Benchmarking disk performance

There are tools such as Iozone (http://www.iozone.org), smallfile (https://github.com/bengland2/smallfile), and Flexible IO (https://github.com/axboe/fio), which are available to benchmark disk performance. For this recipe, we will use FIO. For that, we need to write a job file, which mimics the workload you want to run. Using this job file, we can simulate the workload on the target. For this recipe, let's take the FIO example from the benchmark results, which IBM has published (https://github.com/thewmf/kvm-docker-comparison/tree/master/fio).

Getting ready

On a bare metal/VM/Docker container, install FIO and mount the disk containing a filesystem for each test under /ferrari or anything which is mentioned in the FIO job file. On bare metal, you can mount natively; on the VM, you can mounted using the virtual disk driver or perform a device pass-through. On Docker, we can attach the filesystem from the host machine using Docker volumes.

Prepare the workload file...