Sunday, May 12, 2013

Network Performance Throughput Testing in Virtualized or Physical Environments using iperf


Dropped packets should not occur on any network because they typically indicate congestion in the network or an issue possibly with hardware. One percent dropped packets in either direction can significantly throttle overall throughput.

Dropped packets in vSphere can be monitored by selecting the ESXi host and clicking the Performance tab. Select Advanced > Network > Real Time, and select None in Counters. Select Receive packets dropped and Transmit packets dropped.

Iperf is a network testing tool that can create a TCP or UDP data stream between two virtual or physical nodes. Iperf is open source software available for both Linux and Windows at http://sourceforge.net/projects/iperf/.

To test the maximum throughput of the network interfaces for 200 seconds:

On the server node, execute the following command:

$ iperf -s -i 5

On the client node, execute the following command:

$ iperf -c <server-name> -t 200 -i 5 –m

During one of my future posts I will be posting the demo of the utility in action in a VMware ESXi environment.

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