Citrix has made available the XenServer Virtual Machine Performance Utility. The utility is provided as a virtual appliance running Debian Linux which you can run on XenServer 5.5 or 5.6.
Basically you start with configuring a webserver on the performance VM, providing it with the ip address and credentials of the Pool Master, so the VM can control it. From a web page running on the performance VM you can then start the utilities.
The following test utilities are provided:
Disk I/O performance utility – From XenCenter you create and attach thin provisioned Virtual Desktops from the storage repository to the resource pool. Through the webservice running on the performance VM an inflate for the thin provisioned VM will be initiated, and this process will be measured performance wise. The following disk I/Os will be measured: sequential read/writes and random read/writes with various specified block sizes. In order to access performance data, the tool needs access to Dom0.
Network I/O performance utility – Which uses a modified version of netperf. Netperf runs on the back end and provides end-to-end request/response round trip latency and TCP/UDP throughput tests. For this it needs a Linux VM or dom0 at a remote site on which netserver, the receiving part of netperf must be installed and running.
We might even see Citrix porting the utility in the future, so that it can be used for Hyper-V for example, since they share a similar architecture.
Thanks to Alexander Ervik Johnsen for providing the news…