All I have been getting a lot of questions offline lately for what I do to test the performance of Linux VMs with and without the Linux ICs.  So here is a quick write-up on how I do my tests.

Note:  These tests we done on a beefy system, however it was by no means a production server, and it did have other load at the time.  You should experience better performance numbers assuming you have an adequately sized host.

VM was Debian 5 amd64 with a single core, 1GB of RAM, no GUI, and a 40GB vhd file.

Test is a single command:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/test.file bs=4M count=1000 conv=notrunc

Upon the conclusion of the copy it will give you specifics of the transfer.  It will give you a MB/s and a seconds data point.

Without Integration Components – 46MB/sec total 89 seconds

With Integration Components – 189MB/sec total 22 seconds

Another method of testing I have been using is hdparm:

# hdparm –t /dev/hda