Pre-provisioned Machines

How To Run Benchmarks Without Cloud Provisioning (e.g., local workstation)

---

It is possible to run PerfKit Benchmarker without running the Cloud provisioning steps. This is useful if you want to run on a local machine, or have a benchmark like iperf run from an external point to a Cloud VM.

In order to do this you need to make sure: The static (i.e. not provisioned by PerfKit Benchmarker) machine is ssh'able The user PerfKitBenchmarker will login as has 'sudo' access.

Next, you will want to create a YAML user config file describing how to connect to the machine as follows:

static_vms:
  - &vm1 # Using the & character creates an anchor that we can
         # reference later by using the same name and a * character.
    ip_address: 170.200.60.23
    user_name: voellm
    ssh_private_key: /home/voellm/perfkitkeys/my_key_file.pem
    zone: Siberia
    disk_specs:
      - mount_point: /data_dir

• The ip_address is the address where you want benchmarks to run.
• ssh_private_key is where to find the private ssh key.
• zone can be anything you want. It is used when publishing results.
• disk_specs is used by all benchmarks which use disk (i.e., fio, bonnie++, many others).

In the same file, configure any number of benchmarks (in this case just iperf), and reference the static VM as follows:

iperf:
  vm_groups:
    vm_1:
      static_vms:
        - *vm1

I called my file iperf.yaml and used it to run iperf from Siberia to a GCP VM in us-central1-f as follows:

python pkb.py --benchmarks=iperf --machine_type=f1-micro \
              --benchmark_config_file=iperf.yaml --zone=us-central1-f \
              --ip_addresses=EXTERNAL

• ip_addresses=EXTERNAL tells PerfKit Benchmarker not to use 10.X (ie Internal) machine addresses that all Cloud VMs have. Just use the external IP address.

If a benchmark requires two machines like iperf, you can have two machines in the same YAML file as shown below. This means you can indeed run between two machines and never provision any VMs in the Cloud.

static_vms:
  - &vm1
    ip_address: <ip1>
    user_name: connormccoy
    ssh_private_key: /home/connormccoy/.ssh/google_compute_engine
    internal_ip: 10.240.223.37
    install_packages: false
  - &vm2
    ip_address: <ip2>
    user_name: connormccoy
    ssh_private_key: /home/connormccoy/.ssh/google_compute_engine
    internal_ip: 10.240.234.189
    ssh_port: 2222

iperf:
  vm_groups:
    vm_1:
      static_vms:
        - *vm2
    vm_2:
      static_vms:
        - *vm1