Skip to content

fio — Flexible I/O Tester

Tool: fio Status: Structure Ready

fio provides fine-grained storage I/O benchmarking with precise control over block sizes, queue depths, I/O engines, and workload patterns. It runs inside Linux VMs on the Azure Local cluster via Ansible deployment.

Run This Test

Prerequisites

  • Linux VMs deployed on your Azure Local cluster
  • Ansible 2.14+ installed on your management workstation
  • SSH key-based access to Linux VMs
  • Framework prerequisites completed

Step 1 — Install fio on target VMs

.\tools\fio\scripts\Install-Fio.ps1 `
    -ClusterName "hci01.corp.infiniteimprobability.com" `
    -Nodes @("hci01-node1", "hci01-node2")

This triggers an Ansible playbook that installs the fio package on the specified Linux VMs.

Step 2 — Run a workload profile

.\tools\fio\scripts\Start-FioTest.ps1 `
    -ClusterName "hci01.corp.infiniteimprobability.com" `
    -Nodes @("hci01-node1", "hci01-node2") `
    -Profile "random-read" `
    -DurationSeconds 300

Step 3 — Collect results

.\tools\fio\scripts\Collect-FioResults.ps1 `
    -ClusterName "hci01.corp.infiniteimprobability.com" `
    -Nodes @("hci01-node1", "hci01-node2") `
    -RunId "<run-id-from-previous-step>"

When to Use fio vs VMFleet

Scenario Use fio Use VMFleet
Linux VM storage performance :white_check_mark:
Fine-grained I/O parameter control :white_check_mark:
Fleet-scale Windows HCI storage load :white_check_mark:
Data integrity verification :white_check_mark:
I/O scheduler / queue depth testing :white_check_mark:

Key Capabilities

  • Job file-based workload definition for reproducible tests
  • Multiple I/O engines — libaio, io_uring, Windows IOCP
  • JSON output for automated parsing and reporting
  • Verification mode for data integrity testing
  • Client/server mode for distributed I/O testing across nodes

What You Get

After a test completes, you will have:

  • JSON output per node with IOPS, bandwidth (KB/s), and latency percentiles
  • Aggregated metrics across all nodes
  • Reports in PDF, DOCX, and/or XLSX format

File Locations

Component Path
Scripts tools/fio/scripts/
Workload Profiles tools/fio/config/profiles/
Ansible Playbooks tools/fio/playbooks/
Alert Rules tools/fio/monitoring/alert-rules.yml
Report Templates tools/fio/reports/templates/
Tests tools/fio/tests/
Logs tools/fio/logs/

Deep Dive

Topic Page
Ansible deployment details Installation
Profile parameters and tuning Workload Profiles
Alert rules during test runs Monitoring
Report formats and templates Reporting
Common errors and fixes Troubleshooting

Automate This Test

To run fio tests on a schedule or as part of a CI/CD workflow, see CI/CD Pipelines. The pipeline calls the same scripts listed above.