My new requirement at home become quieter servers or no more home lab (you know what I mean :-)). So, I had to change my Cisco and HP servers to a custom build workstation/server with Super Micro motherboard. For on-board storage, I used SSDs from my old servers and added a new Samsung 960EVO M.2 card on it.

After the server build I felt like time to test my 3 different SSDs on board. After reviewing few of the benchmark tools, I preferred HCI Bench from VMware fling over other tools. It run on ESXi, which is suitable for me. HCI Bench come as ova file. So i just require to import the file to my ESXi server and can start my tests.

Without reading any documentation / note (isn’t that the case for most of us?), I downloaded the ova file from VMware fling site and start import that to my ESXi 6.5 using built-in webclient. Bang!!!! my first hurdle!!! It failed !! Cannot importing the file.

After quick trying to troubleshot, I guessed I need vCenter to import the file and yes!! it’s working.

After install the system, i need to visit the url http://’HCI Bench IP address’:808 to configure the test. The url provided me a form that i need to fill manually, that includes datacentre name, cluster name, datastore name etc. Initially I thought, I can use ‘EASY RUN’ option from the test, but i was wrong. ”EASY RUN’ is for VSAN only. So, i had to setup a test config file (another form). Values are –

Number of VMs	10
Number of Data Disk	1
Size of Data Disk	2 GB
Number of Disks to Test	1
Working-Set Percentage	50%
Number of Threads Per Disk	2
Block Size	4K
Read Percentage	50%
Random Percentage	50%
Test Time	600 Sec
Warmup Time	60 Sec

 

After run same tests for 3 different SSD’s here is what I get –

	SanDisk Extreme	Samsun 850 Evo	Samsung 960 Evo
Datastor	SandDE	S850E	S960E
VMs	10	10	10
IOPS	37257.13 IO/s	50091.83 IO/s	109677.31 IO/s
THROUGHPUT	145.54 MB/s	195.68 MB/s	428.43 MB/s
LATENCY	0.5335 ms	0.3960 ms	0.1791 ms
R_LATENCY	0.9266 ms	0.6034 ms	0.3119 ms
W_LATENCY	0.1396 ms	0.1886 ms	0.0466 ms
Resource Usage
CPU USAG	6.43%	8.42%	13.71%
RAM USAGE	5.0%	5.0%	5.0%
VSAN PCPU USAGE	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%

The workstation build with 2x 14 Core CPU and 512 GB memory.