Benchmarking Kubernetes infrastructure using K-Bench

K-Bench is a framework to benchmark the control and data plane aspects of a Kubernetes cluster. More details are available at https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/k-bench. In my case, I am going to conduct this benchmarking study on a Tanzu Kubernetes cluster which is provisioned using Tanzu Kubernetes Grid service on a vSphere 7 U1 cluster.

Step 1: Clone the K-Bench repo

git clone https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/k-bench.git

Step 2: Install

./install.sh

Once the installation is done it will say, "Completed k-bench installation.".

Step 3: Run the benchmark

./run.sh

If you don't specify any test, then it is going to conduct the default set of tests. All sets of tests are defined under the config directory. If you browse to the config directory and list, there are separate folders specific to each test. You can see folders starting with cp and dp, and it refers to control plane and data plane related tests.

If no specific test is mentioned, then it is going to run all that is defined in the default directory. You can also see details of the test and results in the logs. The directories starting with "results" will have log files corresponding to each test run.

Following is a sample log that shows a summary of pod creation throughput, pod creation average latency, pod startup total latency, list/ update/ delete pod latency, etc.

Now, if you want to run a specific test case, you can do it as follows:

Usage: ./run.sh -r <run-tag> [-t <comma-separated-tests> -o <output-dir>]

DP network internode test

For example, you can run a data plane test to check the network performance between two nodes as shown below.

./run.sh -r "kbench-run-on-tkg-cluster-02"  -t "dp_network_internode" -o "./"

As soon as you run the above command, two pods will be created inside "kbench-pod-namespace" on two worker nodes as you see below.

It will then start "iperf3" process inside those two pods to create a network load following a client-server model as per the actions defined in the config.json file.

Sample logs are given below. It shows details like the amount of data transferred, transfer rate, network latency, etc.

Once the test run is complete, the pods and other resources created will be automatically deleted. Similarly, you can select the other set of tests that are pre-defined in the framework. I believe you have the flexibility to define custom test cases too as per your requirements. I hope it was useful. Cheers!

Related posts

Storage performance benchmarking of Tanzu Kubernetes clusters
Monitoring Tanzu Kubernetes cluster using Prometheus and Grafana

References

Dell EMC PowerFlex MP for vROps 8.x - Part7 - Create custom reports

In March 2020, I published a blog on how to create custom views and reports in vROps 8.x. This article explains how to create a custom storage report for Dell EMC PowerFlex using the PowerFlex Management Pack for vROps 8.x. 

Sample PowerFlex Storage Report PDF and template is available in my GitHub repo for download. You can use it as a starting point/ modify it as per requirement.

To create a new view: Dashboards - Views - Add.

Provide a name and description for the new view. Here, for example, I will create a view that shows PowerFlex Protection Domain Info.

Select List.

Select Protection Domain as subject and group it by PowerFlex Rack/ Appliance System.

Double click or drag and drop the selected metrics or properties to include in the view. In the following screenshot, I selected 4 capacity metrics to include in the view.

You can also select and change the units and transformation as per requirements. Once it is done, click Save.

Now a view is created. Similarly, you can create multiple views for the different PowerFlex resource kinds. The next step is to include this view in an existing template or in a new template. 

To create a new report template: Dashboards - Reports - Add.

• Provide a name and description for the new report template.
• From the views and dashboards, find the PowerFlex Protection Domain Info view that we created earlier, double-click or drag and drop them to the right pane. You can add multiple views to be included in this report template.
• Select PDF and CSV.
• Select all the layout options if you like to and click Save.
• Now the custom report template is created. You can select it and click Run.

Select PowerFlex and then select PowerFlex World and click ok.

The report will run in the background and will be available to download under the "Generated Reports" tab. You can select it and download the PDF or CSV file. You can even configure a schedule to generate a report and email it or save it to a location automatically based on your requirements. Hope it was useful. Cheers!

Related posts

Part1: Install
Part2: Configure
Part3: Dashboards
Part4: Resource kinds and relationships
Part5: Collection interval
Part6: Create custom alerts