Ceph Benchmark Tools, Part 4

Ceph is a distributed storage over network. So, the network performance is a key factor in measuring Ceph performance. So, we need a tool for measuring network performance as one of Ceph base performance. In this article we will take a look at a network performance tool, iperf. There are two versions of iperf on Ubuntu 22.04: iperf and iperf3. For this article, we will use iperf (iperf2).

Let’s start with installing it on both server and client sides.

sudo apt install -y iperf

We are interested in these options:

# On server side
iperf -s 
# On client side
iperf -c [server]
# Common option
-p [port/range port (p1-p2), default port 5001]
-l [buffer size]
-P [number of parallel]
-t [duration in seconds]
-f [format, like g for Gbit]
-e # enhanced output]

The following screenshots show an instance of running iperf between a Ceph monitor node and another ubuntu22 VM.

iperf server on ceph monitor VM

iperf client on a Ubuntu22 VM

There are many other options for iperf. For example, — trip-times can be used to measure latencies.

But for the sake of getting network performance as a baseline factor of Ceph performance, the above options would be sufficient.