I have just acquired a server with:

2x quadcore Xeons

48G ECC RAM

5x 160GB SSDs on an LSI 9260-8i

Before deploying the target platform, I'd like to collect as much benchmark data as possible, testing I/O with hardware RAID in various configurations, ZFS zRAID, as well as I/O performance on vSphere and with KVM virtualization. In order to see real disk I/O performance without cache effects, I tried running Iozone with a maximum file of more than twice the physical RAM as recommended in the documentation, so:

iozone -a -g100G

However, as one might expect, this takes far too long to be practicable. (I stopped the run after seven hours..)

I'd like to reduce the range of record and file sizes to values that might reflect realistic performance for an application server, hopefully getting the run times to under an hour or so.

Any ideas?

Thanks.