How to Test the Transfer Speeds between PlateSpin Source and Target Machines

During a PlateSpin migration/replication, the data is not necessarily transferred continuously between source and target machine but may halt intermittently for various reasons. Therefore, the average data transfer speed from the job report may be impacted and not be the actual real transfer speed.

A PlateSpin administrator may wish to test the transfer speeds between the source and the target machine.

Use the file transfer tool to test the transfers between the client and server.

Prerequisites for using the file transfer tool:

• The workload must be a Windows machine

• The source server should have .Net Frameworks 3.5 SP1 installed.

• The File Transfer Tester tool should be uploaded/copied to the source server.

• A successful migration /replication, since the target machine must have a valid mounted Windows volume.

• The latest Take Control ISO, for the target, which includes the script FileTransferTester
  in the LRDTools directory.

• A network route between the PlateSpin target and the source server.

Instructions for using the file transfer test tool

1. If the Target is a virtual machine, mount the Take Control ISO in VMware. Otherwise, place the Take Control ISO in the physical target's optical drive.

2. Boot the target. Press [ALT]+[F2] to access the tools menu. Select option 5 to configure networking on the target. Provide the IP address and subnet for a statically assigned address or select DHCP as shown below (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Configuring the interface via DHCP.

3. Hit [ALT]+[F3] to access the shell. Verify the Target machine's IP configuration using the ifconfig command. Verify that the target can ping the source server (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Verifying Target configuration and communication with the Source server.

4. Verify the Source machine's IP configuration and ping the Target server (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Verifying Source configuration and communication with the Target server.

5. Locate a Windows partition on the Target server and mount it for the test. A list of the disk partitions is stored in /proc/partitions and may be viewed using cat /proc/partitions as seen in Figure 4.

6. Create a mount point and mount the partition as seen in Figure 5.

7 Using the ls command, view the directory structure and verify the mounted partition contains the Windows directory. If the directory does not contain the Windows directory, dismount the partition using umount /mnt/winsda1. Mount the next partition /dev/sda2 as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Mounting the Windows file system and verifying the location of the Windows directory.

8. Create a test directory and copy some large files to it for testing on the Source. In this example C:\Temp\Files will be used for testing (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Test files

9. Copy and extract the FileTransferTester archive in C:\Temp\Files. The contents will be extracted into C:\Temp\Files\FileTransferTester (Figure 7).

Figure 7 File Transfer Tester tool extraction.

12. On the target machine execute the FileTransferTester tool command using the following command format

./FileTransferTester /role=target /type=file /mode=full path=[PATH] /ip=[SOURCE_IP]

Replace [PATH] with the mount point used in the mount command.

Replace [SOURCE_IP] with the Source IP address.

Using the mount point of /mnt/winsda1 and Source IP address of 10.46.8.51 the command executed is shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8. FileTransferTester execution

13. On the Source server in the directory where the File Transfer Test tool was exacted the File Transfer Tester should be executed. The command format is:

FileTransferTester /type=file /mode=full /role=source path=[PATH]

Replace [PATH] with the location where the test files are stored.

In this example the path is C:\Temp\Files (see Figure 6). The command to execute is shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9. FileTransferTester execution on the Source machine.

The file transfer test will start and the tool will show files being transferred (Figure 10).

Figure 10. File transfer progress.

At the end of the transfer an error the following error is expected:

Unhandled Exception: System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access to path “/mnt/cdrom/LRDTools/results.out.client” is denied

This message may be ignored since data can't be written to the ISO.

Figure 11. Unhandled Exception error message.

To see the results of the test, review summary displayed on the source at the end of the test.