ORION – Oracle I/O Numbers Calibration Tool

Dec 27

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Thanks to Franck Pachot post on dba-village.com, I re-discovered the Oracle tool for benchmarking I/O subsystem, called ORION (the link to this tool was posted by Tony van Esch on October 2005 on dba-village as well — I did bookmarked that link back then, but flushed from my memory cache soon after).

Orion can be downloaded from OTN:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/tech/orion/index.html

It’s available for AIX, Solaris, Linux and Windows. From the same URL you can also download ORION Users Guide – it’s short and to the point.

I tested ORION on Windows XP with 8GB raw partition; basically I followed Users guide. 

1) Installed orion with msi package
2) I created raw partition and assigned letter X: to it
3) created mytest.lun file within directory where orion was installed to. File mytest.lun has single line, since I tested with single "disk":

\\.\X:

4) run simple I/O test

D:\ORACLE\ORION>orion -run simple -testname mytest -num_disks 1

ORION: ORacle IO Numbers -- Version 10.2.0.1.0
Test will take approximately 9 minutes
Larger caches may take longer

5) orion writes results in txt/csv files. Follow instructions in Users Guide if you wish to graphically represent the data in your spreadsheet of choice.

The tool has numerous options, so make sure you read ORION Users Guide!

Original question that triggered Franck reply was: is there equivalent tool for Oracle as it’s for MS SQL Server, SQLIO.EXE (an I/O meter for SQL Server). So, if you’re responsible (doomed) for SQL Servers maintenance as well and want to adequately measure I/O throughput of underlying storage, then SQLIO.EXE is the tool for you.

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Posted on 27.12.2007, in Oracle and tagged . Bookmark the permalink. 1 Comment.

  1. alesk | 15.01.2008 at 00:00

    Running ORION on Windows x64
    Today I tried for the first time to measure I/O with ORION on Windows x64 attached to IBM DS8000. Some basic information about the hardware:

    Server: Fujitsu Siemens – Primergy RX800-S3 (everything inside, except the frond end with logo is actually made by IBM)
    HBA: 2 x Emulex LightPulse (4Gbps) with IBM SDDDM driver

    Test “disk” was 98GB in size configured on RAID5 expansion pool at DS8000.

    First, I tried with raw partition, specifying the raw partition in ds8000_1.lun files, as mentioned above (\\.\X:).

    Here is the result:

    C:\Program Files (x86)\Oracle\Orion>orion -run simple -testname ds8000_1 -num_disks 1
ORION: ORacle IO Numbers -- Version 10.2.0.1.0
Test will take approximately 9 minutes
Larger caches may take longer

storax_skgfr_getsizes: Couldn't get FILE size for \\.\X:
rwbase_lio_init_luns: lun_openvols failed
rwbase_rwluns: rwbase_lio_init_luns failed
orion_thread_main: rw_luns failed
Non test error occurred
Orion exiting

    My first thought was that 98GB raw partition is perhaps too large for the tool, so I tried with smaller one, 8GB. The result was the same. Don’t know what is the culprit for the error, perhaps the fact that ORION is 32-bit application running inside WOW64.

    I tried using file and this time it worked. I used a copy of real Oracle database file, 4GB in size (if you’re going to use this approach make sure that dbf file is a dummy one, something you can miss ;-).

    I placed file name (X:\DATA1_01.DBF) in my ds8000_1.lun instead of raw partition name (\\.\X:) and repeat the test.

    C:\Program Files (x86)\Oracle\Orion>orion -run simple -testname ds8000_1 -num_disks 1
ORION: ORacle IO Numbers -- Version 10.2.0.1.0
Test will take approximately 9 minutes
Larger caches may take longer

    And here is the result from ds8000_1_summary.txt:

    ORION VERSION 10.2.0.1.0

Commandline:
-run simple -testname ds8000_1 -num_disks 1 

This maps to this test:
Test: ds8000_1
Small IO size: 8 KB
Large IO size: 1024 KB
IO Types: Small Random IOs, Large Random IOs
Simulated Array Type: CONCAT
Write: 0%
Cache Size: Not Entered
Duration for each Data Point: 60 seconds
Small Columns:,      0
Large Columns:,      0,      1,      2
Total Data Points: 8

Name: X:\DATA1_01.DBF	Size: 4194312192
1 FILEs found.

Maximum Large MBPS=649.37 @ Small=0 and Large=2
Maximum Small IOPS=17390 @ Small=5 and Large=0
Minimum Small Latency=0.21 @ Small=2 and Large=0