Workstation Storage: Modeling, CAD, Programming, And Virtualization

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We use a mixture of real-world and synthetic benchmarks to quantify storage performance in our reviews. But how do you know our methodology is sound? We decided to test several workstation-oriented apps in order to generate real-world performance data.

VMware: Operating System Installation

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Overall StatisticsHeader Cell - Column 1
Elapsed Time11:35
Read Operations72 057
Write Operations219 313
Data Read2.07 GB
Data Written8.82 GB
Disk Busy Time36.560 s
Average Data Rate305.26 MB/s

Many workstation users exploit the flexibility of virtualization to enable multiple operating environments on a single hardware platform. In this specific trace, we installed Windows 7 64-bit to VMware Workstation using its default settings (20 GB VM file). The resulting performance profile reflects a write-heavy task. About 50% of the operations occur at a queue depth of one, and another 40% occur between two and four. Interestingly, only 59% of the data transferred is sequential. Finally, as expected, only about a quarter of operations are 4 KB blocks; the rest are larger.

I/O Trends:

  • 49% of all operations occur at queue depth of one
  • 40% of all operations occur at queue depth between two and four
  • 59% of all data transferred is sequential
  • 24% of all operations are 4 KB in transfer size
  • 21% of all operations are 64 KB in transfer size