HCI Performance testing made easy (Part 1)

Published: September 7, 2018 (Updated: July 31, 2020) in X-Ray, hyperconverged, hci, x-ray, video by gary.

How to create a customized performance test using X-ray.

X-Ray can do the following for the performance tester.

Model IO workloads using standard fio format
Create VMs based on user-specified criteria (CPUs, Memory, Number & Size of disks)
Provision the VMs to a HCI cluster (Nutanix AHV, ESXi, Hyper-V)
Execute the workloads
Display and store the results

In particular X-Ray give the additional benefits that most workload generators do not

Specify and deploy workloads with different IO patterns and characteristics
- Most workload generators create a uniform workload on all workers
Execute and terminate sub-workloads on a user-specified timeline
- e.g. Begin workload 1 then introduce workload 2 and measure the interference
Introduce failure scenarios and measure the impact to performance

The files are in my X-ray GitHub