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Building the 2012 AnandTech SMB / SOHO NAS Testbed

 by Ganesh T S on September 5, 2012 6:00 PM EST
74 Comments | Add A Comment
74 Comments

The virtualization infrastructure in our testbed involved running Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2. The benchmarking programs include IOMeter 1.1rc1 / Dynamo and Intel NASPT. While the former is used to test multi-client performance, the latter is used for testing the single client scenario. IOMeter itself runs on the host machine, while Dynamo instances run on each VM. Intel NASPT is run from one of the VMs only. Twelve guest machines were set up with similar configurations as below:

2012 AnandTech NAS Testbed Virtual Machine Configuration
CPU 1 vCPU
Memory Static 2GB
IDE Controller 0 Physical Disk X (64GB OCZ Vertex 4 SSD)
Network Adapter 0 Local Area Connection X (ESA-I340 Port)
Network Adapter 1 Internal Network
OS Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Each VM gets one vCPU. By default, each VMs gets 2GB of RAM. However, when performing the robocopy tests to transfer a Blu-ray folder structure to and from the NAS, we choose to increase the amount of memory in that particular VM to 24GB (since only one VM is active in this case). This enables the creation of a RAM disk to house the folder structure (10.7GB). Under all scenarios, the host OS has a 32GB RAM disk mounted at startup. The RAM disks were created and mounted with Passmark Software’s free utility, OSFMount.

Two network interfaces are set up for each VM. While one of them connects to the NAS through one of the physical LAN ports provided by the Intel ESA-I340 and gets its IP address through DHCP in the 192.168.1.x subnet, the other is an internal network between the VMs and the host machine. With the host taking the static IP 10.0.0.1, each VM’s internal network interface is set up with a static IP of the form 10.0.0.x, with x between 2 and 13. The 32GB RAM disk mounted on the host is shared over this internal network for the VMs and the host to exchange information on the fly.

The guest OS on each of the VMs is Windows 7 Ultimate x64. The intention of the build is to determine how the performance of the NAS under test degrades when multiple clients begin to access it. This degradation might be in terms of increased response time or a decrease in available bandwidth. Both of these can be measured using IOMeter. While IOMeter is the controlling program installed in the host, each of the VMs run the Dynamo workload generator component. Dynamo and IOMeter communicate through the internal network to ensure that there is no effect on the benchmark runs.

Four distinct workloads corresponding to the storage performance evaluation metrics outlined here were set up to run on each machine. In the first pass, only the first VM runs the workload and reports the results. In the second pass, the first two VMs run the workload and report back and so on, till we conclude the IOMeter benchmark runs with all the twelve VMs running workloads simultaneously and reporting results. Fortunately, all the synchronization aspects are handled by IOMeter itself.

Manually running the dynamo process on each VM and restarting it after the completion of each pass is definitely a cumbersome process. To make things a little easier, we installed SSH servers on all the VMs. Bitvise SSH Server was our software of choice for the ease of use and configurability. After installing Strawberry Perl (on the host as well as all the VMs), we developed a small script to SSH from the host into each of the VMs in order, mount the NAS share and run Dynamo multiple times in sequence. The ICF files used in each of the twelve passes are available for download here.

In our review of the Western Digital Red hard drive, we used this testbed to fill up the NAS to varying levels. For this purpose, some files and folders were copied onto the RAM disk in the host which was shared over the 10.0.0.x internal network. This shared disk was mounted on all the VMs. A Perl script to copy over the contents from the mounted RAM disk (as many times as necessary to achieve a required fill percentage) to the NAS drive was processed. This simulates the NAS being subject to activity from multiple clients in the process of getting filled up.

In the next two sections, we will take a look at the sort of results that this testbed is able to provide us in terms of evaluating NAS performance.

Hardware Build - Chassis and PSU Testbed in Action : Synology DS211+
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  • Zarquan - Thursday, September 6, 2012 - link

    I might be missing something really obvious here .. but if the highest power consumption was 146.7 W (IOMeter 100% Seq 100% Reads [ 12 VMs ]), then why did you need a 850W power supply ?

    Either the system is using a lot more than the 146.7 W you quoted in your power consumption figures, or the power supply is way over specified.
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/6241/building-the-20...

  • ganeshts - Thursday, September 6, 2012 - link

    This is not the only workload we plan to run on the machine.

    We were ready to put up with some inefficiency just to make sure we didn't have to open up the machine and put in a more powerful PSU down the road. The 850W PSU should serve the testbed well for future workloads which might be more stressful.

  • ydafff - Thursday, September 6, 2012 - link

    I’m VCP:5 / 4 and MCSE and MCITP:VA / EA
    This setup for 12 VMs way overkill..
    Best for this test bad will be VMware vSphere Hypervisor( Free ESXi) – much better memory and vCPU and storage management or MS Hyper-V 2008 R2 free server - try to use free Hyper-V 2008 server much less HD space and compute resources needed
    Regarding VMs density you could easy run all 12 VMs(1-2 GB memory) from single Sandy Bridge-E CPU or 1155 Xeon(i7) CPU with really good performance. Storage 2x intel 320 series 600GB SSD in RAID 1(you will need Redundancy) with thin provisioning will do trick.

  • ganeshts - Thursday, September 6, 2012 - link

    ydaff, Thanks for the inputs.

    We are working towards increasing the VM density in the current testbed itself. As another reader pointed out, 12 VMs were not enough to stress the Thecus N4800.

    I decided not go with the Hyper-V 2008 R2 free server because I needed to run some programs / scripts in the host OS and the Z9PE-D8 WS had drivers specifically for Win Server 2008 R2.

  • eanazag - Thursday, September 6, 2012 - link

    Seems like a lot of people are talking about it being over the top. I agree with the route Anandtech took - could have even went farther. How far can they be pushed is my question? I want to see when they start smoking NAS's. The article and concept is great. I like to know how the site sets up its test scenarios and equipment. It lets me know if my use case is higher or lower and what the device being reviewd can do. I look at your testing methods to decide if your data is worth considering. I continue to be an avid reader here because of the effort placed. If you had one PC with one NIC, anyone in their house can test it like that. Why even write reviews about NAS's if that is how far you are going to test? Great job, Anandtech.

    I have some applications at work I would like to create repeatable tests for. An article about how to automate applications for testing would be helpful. I saw that we got a little in this article. I would also like to see more enterprise equipment being tested if you can swing it.

  • KingHerod - Friday, September 7, 2012 - link

    NAS devices are convenient and generally low-power, but it would be nice to see a comparison to some real metal with a real server OS like Server 2k8R2. Maybe a repurposed older computer with a couple drives mirrored and an actual, low end server with some SAS drives.

  • dbarth1409 - Friday, September 7, 2012 - link

    Ganesh,

    Good work. I'm looking forward to seeing some future test results.

  • dijuremo - Monday, September 10, 2012 - link

    This asus motherboard is not truly ACPI compliant, ASUS knows it and they do not want to fix it. Their tech support has given stupid excuses to posts from users trying to run Windows 8 and 2012 server on it.

    If you boot either Windows 8 or 2012 server RTM on it, it blue screens with error:
    0xA5: ACPI_BIOS_ERROR

    You just need to check the reviews at the egg to confirm.

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...

  • ganeshts - Monday, September 10, 2012 - link

    Looks like Asus has updated support files for Windows 8.

  • VTArbyP - Monday, September 10, 2012 - link

    I wonder what would happen if you did use Linux for the host and VM oses? I suppose that would become a test of Linux vs Windows! Heh.
    More seriously, why not add at least one VM of "the current popular distro" of Linux and and a Mac OS X machine Use them with NTFS drivers and / or reformat a NAS partition to native ext# and another to HFS+. Point being, how does the NAS react to mixed client loads and not all smb, as someone commented above. The other test this beast seems ideal for is comparisons of several non-local storage solutions - someone mentioned iSCSI, and I can imagine tryiing some types of SANs - might add an infiniband adapter - being of interest. The point of that would simply be to see what form of non-local storage was fastest, best value, easiest to maintain, etc, etc for us mortals who want to connect 6 - 12 machines, We, being the folks who DON'T run lans for a living and are not up to speed on what IT people already know
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