How Fast and Robust Is Your Storage? - Professional SQL Server 2005 Performance Tuning - page 461

❑ Makesfilesnon-shrinkable

❑ No sequential reads

❑ No random access

❑ Bulk updates in big chunks without delays

❑ Sqliosim.sparse.cfg.ini

❑ Uses only 32MB of memory

❑ Makes target I/O duration large enough to enable many outstanding I/O requests

❑

Disables scatter/gather APIs to issue separate I/O requests for every 8KB page

❑ Creates a 1 GB non-shrinkable file

❑ Creates a 1 GB non-shrinkable secondary sparse stream in the file

Although these are a good set of options, what you are looking for is something that simulates the
I/O activity on your OLTP, or DSS system, and then you might also look at a range of other
operations such as bulk-loading data or running DBCC. To do this you are going to have to create
your own config file. To create your own config file, you have to dig into the details of the different ini
file sections.

ConfiguringSQLIOSim
Although it looks like you can adjust all the configuration settings through the user interface, in reality
all you can do through the user interface is choose a different config file and specify the settings for the
test files (the FileX section of the config file), and some of the system level configuration settings (which
aren't specified in the config file). You can't even see what the settings are for the other key configuration
sections, which are discussed here:

❑ Filex: This section allows you to set the attributes of the files to be tested.

❑ Config: The config section allows you to set the same settings as are available through the config-

uration dialog box. These are settings that control the execution of the test such as run duration,
number of runs, and so on. There are a number of other settings available in this section that
can't be set through the user interface, and these are:
❑

CPUCount

❑ CacheHitRatio

❑ MaxOutstandingIO

❑ TargetIODuration

❑ AllowIOBursts

❑ NoBuffering

❑ WriteThrough

❑ ScatterGather

❑ ForceReadAhead

❑ StampFiles

For more details on these settings please refer to KB article 231619 on configuring SQLIOSim.