68016: Acronis Cyber Infrastructure: How to measure network throughput between nodes using iPerf3

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Last update: 20-12-2022

Introduction

Acronis Cyber Infrastructure  (ACI) is a storage cluster, a group of servers (nodes) interconnected by the network, thus it is vital to follow the Network requirements and recommendations during cluster infrastructure planning.

As overall storage cluster performance always depends on network performance between all cluster nodes, it may be required to measure network throughput to pinpoint the network issues or estimate maximum possible throughput between the nodes. iPerf3 is a command-line tool for performing network throughput measurements which may be used as a part of network troubleshooting.

Solution

The common approach is described in the corresponding documentation: Benchmarking Guide - Benchmarking the network.

iPerf3 is available and installed by default in all latest Acronis Cyber Infrastructure versions, although it may be required to install it manually from default ACI repository in case of using ACI versions below 4.0:

[root@acinode1 ~]# yum install iperf3 -y
...
Installed:
  iperf3.x86_64 0:3.1.7-2.el7

Complete!

Example of testing network bandwidth performance between two nodes:

1. From Node 1 run iPerf3 as "server" using the '-s' parameter:

[root@acinode1 ~]# iperf3 -s
-----------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on 5201
-----------------------------------------------------------

It means that iPerf3 server's service is now 'listening' and waiting for a client connection on default port 5201.

Note: To stop the iPerf3 server process, press CTRL+c.

2. From Node 2 run iPerf3 as 'client' connecting to Node 1 IP address (192.168.1.111) using the '-c' parameter:

[root@acinode2 ~]# iperf3 -c 192.168.1.111
Connecting to host 192.168.1.111, port 5201
[  4] local 192.168.1.112 port 33944 connected to 192.168.1.111 port 5201
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr  Cwnd
[  4]   0.00-1.00   sec   417 MBytes  3.49 Gbits/sec    0   1.02 MBytes
...
[  4]   9.00-10.00  sec   374 MBytes  3.14 Gbits/sec    0   2.44 MBytes
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  4.70 GBytes  4.03 Gbits/sec    0             sender
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  4.69 GBytes  4.03 Gbits/sec                  receiver
 

Note: use IPs of the nodes belonging to the network with Storage traffic type assigned.

3. The results will be also observed on iPerf3 server (Node 1) afterwards:

[root@acinode1 ~]# iperf3 -s
-----------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on 5201
-----------------------------------------------------------
Accepted connection from 192.168.1.112, port 33942
[  5] local 192.168.1.111 port 5201 connected to 192.168.1.112 port 33944
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth
[  5]   0.00-1.00   sec   395 MBytes  3.31 Gbits/sec
...
[  5]  10.00-10.04  sec  9.63 MBytes  2.10 Gbits/sec
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth
[  5]   0.00-10.04  sec  0.00 Bytes  0.00 bits/sec                  sender
[  5]   0.00-10.04  sec  4.69 GBytes  4.02 Gbits/sec                receiver

In this way it is possible to perform various network checks between different cluster nodes and combining several network checks to simulate the situation when nodes actively communicate to each other for estimation of maximum possible network throughput of infrastructure.

More information

See more details regarding  iperf3 tool in the manual:

man iperf3

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