Benchmarking requirements

Test cluster requirements

In order to obtain the most realistic results, the test cluster must be the same as the production cluster. If this is impossible, the test environment can be a replica of the production cluster or very similar to it.

When trying to determine the ideal setup size, you might want to plan ahead for the possibility to change the hardware configuration of your test cluster. With virtual machines, you can easily change the amount of RAM, the number of CPUs, disks, etc. However, unlike a physical environment, a virtual one might behave unpredictably.

The cluster should be made of identical nodes, to avoid performance disbalance, as the cluster performance is often limited by the performance of the slowest component.

Load generator requirements

Depending on the benchmarking goal, the number of load generators can differ:

• Use a single load generator to benchmark the maximum performance achievable by a single process.
• Use as many load generators as possible to benchmark the maximum cumulative cluster throughput.

In either case, you can run load generators as virtual machines in the Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure cluster or as external machines (physical or virtual). When using external virtual machines for load generators, keep in mind that virtual machines usually share the same network infrastructure. For more accurate results, you need to make sure there is enough physical bandwidth between load generators and the test cluster, and that there are plenty of other physical resources, such as CPUs.

When targeting for the maximum cluster performance, or especially for the cumulative performance of multiple resources, we recommend planning a variable number of load generator clients. This number can reach or exceed the number of nodes in the Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure cluster. If adding more load generators increases the performance results, this means that the load generators' resources or number are not sufficient. Similarly to cluster nodes, load generators must have the same hardware configuration.

Coordinator node requirements

The coordinator node is a special node that is used to coordinate load generators, that is, to start and stop the benchmark on all other nodes. The coordinator node can be either a load generator or a cluster node.

Network requirements

We recommend providing at least 50 GiB of network bandwidth, either as a single 50 GbE link or as a bonded 2x25 GbE network connection, between load generators and the test cluster. Keep in mind that the network can be a bottleneck when measuring performance.

All nodes must be able to reach each other over a network:

• Cluster nodes must be reachable on network ports for standard iSCSI, NFS, and S3 services.
• Load generators must be reachable on TCP port 8765 for fio testing.
• The coordinator node must be reachable on TCP port 2000 for S3 testing.

You can open the ports in the admin panel or via iptables:

# iptables -I INPUT -p tcp -m tcp -m multiport --dports 8765 -j ACCEPT
# iptables -I INPUT -p tcp -m tcp -m multiport --dports 2000 -j ACCEPT