Question on virtual disks

Question

Does HD Speed provide a realistic true performance evaluation of a virtual disk? I have a Windows server hosted on a VM-Ware platform and Disk presented to Windows Server is 1 LUN from an EMC VMAX Disk Array. It is mapped from/striped across several physical disks within the EMC Array. How can the HD Speed "move the file around and read it from several locations on your discs" when there is no single physical disk to "move around" on? Since there many physical disks involved, there is no single point of cylinder/sector 0/0 and max. I have a consultant telling me that based on this tool my server described above has poor performance.The tool appears to be designed for physical media. Is this tool valid for virtual disks?

Answer 1

HD Speed is a tool to measure the performance of a hard disk in terms of read time, access time, copy, write, etc. Typically, if your virtual hard disk is mounted, you will have the possibility to test it, but you'll actually test the physical drive since the writing is performed on the disk file stored. The results should be the same since it's the same drive, even if you have a virtual drive. However, to measure the actual performance, test the speed of the physical drive.