performance - What utilities do you use and how do you use them when benchmarking your harddrive subsystem for a SAN replacement?

So, I have a series of questions into ServerFault about LeftHand SAN's (Questions 1441 and 4478). One of the responses I received questioned the throughput of the iSCSI data returning from the SAN being restricted to the 1GB network card.

I think it is a very good point to look at.

Now to see if this would be an actual bottleneck for my purpose I should perform some benchmarks on the current production server.

What utilities should I use for profiling?
If there are special metrics I should be reading, what are they? IOPS?, Disk Read/Write B/sec?, etc...

Thank you,

Keith

Answer

Iometer appears to be the overwhelming recommendation for testing and benchmarking iSCSI SAN performance. Because it is widely used by vendors, its numbers offer a fairly reliable comparison metric across storage systems.

If you plan on running SQL Server off your SAN, you should also look at doing some testing and tuning with SQLIO. Brent Ozar has a great SAN performance tuning guide at SQLServerPedia using the SQLIO tool that's worth checking out.