Windows Perfmon To Determine Performance For iSCSI

The efficiency monitor is a utility utilised to track a range of processes and give a real time graphical display of the results Windows 2003 program. This tool can be used to help you with the organizing of upgrades, tracking of processes that need to have to be optimized, monitoring outcomes of tuning and configuration scenarios, and the understanding of a workload and its effect on resource usage to determine bottlenecks.

Making use of Windows Perfmon to establish efficiency for iSCSI is not rather the very same when monitoring physical disks that are directly accessed by the system. As you know, your network configuration and equipment will have the greatest impact on iSCSI efficiency. Getting a high efficiency switch that does network buffering and flow manage, getting very good cables between the Target and Initiators, and getting superior NIC cards is crucial to achieving optimal performance. The iSCSI software program is capable of achieving rapidly rates pretty near the theoretical limit of 120 MB/second. But so considerably of the performance depends on the atmosphere in which iSCSI is operating.

You should not be generating any type of iSCSI performance analysis based solely on the Physical Disk counters in Windows Perfmon or follow common performance guidelines that numerous have posted on the net that relate to physical disk I/O considering that they do not apply to iSCSI. There is no physical correlation in between the SAN physical disk queue and the Windows Perfmon physical disk counters as soon as iSCSI is involved as all disk commands are now encapsulated in network packets. You can normally divide the Perfmon physical disk counters by the number of disk spindles on the SAN to arrive at a ballpark number for the Perfmon physical disk counters but it is not an exact science.

A much better method for performance analysis with Windows Perfmon is to add in the Microsoft iSCSI initiator classes focusing on them and the Perfmon network counters such as latency. You may also incorporate the logical disk counters but the similar caveat must apply to them as the physical disk counters they are not the sole measure of iSCSI SAN performance.

PhysicalDiskAvg. Disk Queue Length counter indicates the typical number of both read and writes requests that had been queued for the selected disk for the duration of the sample interval. PhysicalDiskAvg. Disk Read Queue Length counter indicates the average number of read requests that were queued for the selected disk during the sample interval. PhysicalDiskAvg. Disk Write Queue Length counter indicates the typical number of write requests that were queued for the selected disk during the sample interval.