Jet Stress 2013 – First Look!

Another day…. another tool. So. Jet Stress 2013. Microsoft has released it for download here. According to Microsoft in Technet “Jetstress 2013 works with the Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 database engine to simulate the Exchange database and log disk input/output (I/O) load.” While other third party SAN/disk vendors like to use other tools like IOMeter to check their performance, Jetstress concentrates specifically on how Exchange would behave on your current storage setup. This is important if you want to know if you storage is up to snuff for your future Exchange installation. With Jetstress 2013, Microsoft has continued this tradition of testing tools and extended it to Exchange 2013.

Installation

• Simply download the tool from here.
• Then run the Jetstress.msi to install the tool:

Click Next.

Click ‘I accept’ and then Next.

Either leave the defaults or enter a directory you want to install the tool to. Click Next.

Click Next.

Wait for the install to finish and then click Close.
Usage
Find the Jetstress 2013 icon on the Desktop.

Run the tool from here.

Once the tool is open, you will notice that there is a ‘Jetstress Help’ open in the lower left and this gives us a strange window:

It appears Microsoft has not quite yet updated the Help file to match the new version of the program. Also, there is no content in the Help file as of now. I would imagine Microsoft will rectify this at a later date.

If you check the version of Jetstress, it does show that you are running the 2013 version.
Testing Time

Click on ‘Start new test’.

Oops. Just like in previous versions of the tools you need to copy certain files from the existing Exchange installation to the directory where Jetstress is install. So find these files and copy them to your Jetstress folder:

Once these files are copies, close Jetstress, reopen the tool and click ‘Start new test’.

Jetstress will them work on the files you just copies and ask you to close again. Close the program, reopen it and click ‘Start New Test’.

Now Jetstress sees the files it needs and gets to the new test screen:

Leave the defaults and click ‘Next’.

Choose your test here. I selected ‘Test disk subsystem throughput’ and then clicked Next.

Change these numbers to how hard a resource hit you want your server to take. Usually the defaults are fine unless you are trying a particular scenario.

For my test I am leaving the defaults (Performance and Run background maint.) Click Next.

Leave the defaults if you want. Click Next.

Choose your test database and log directories. Enter them here. Enter the number of copies as well.

If you do not have any precreated databases to test, leave the default of ‘Create new databases’. Click Next.

Verify the test settings and then click ‘Run test.’

Argh. Looks like I need more space on my install to do my testing. I added a bunch more space and re-ran my test:


Yet another bump here. Need to make some adjustments and rerun the tests.

I checked the box and left it as 2 threads and then re-ran my test:

At last my test is finished! Now where are the results at?
Browse to the “C:\Program Files\Exchange Jetstress” directory and look for some HTML files with ‘Performance’ at the beginning of the file name. Then double click the file to get your results:

In my case my server failed to test well, which I would have expected since it’s an over taxed test server. In production you should hopefully not experience this issue.
More Information
As of now there is no Field Guide, however you can refer the old one until this gets updated – Download it here.