Provision two Ubuntu VSes, one in a datacenter in the US and one in a datacenter far away—London, Amsterdam, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, or another. Please choose different source and destination datacenters from other groups in your section.
Each VS must have 1gb public and private virtual nics. Configure an SSH key when you provision for easier management. Other VS configuration details are up to you.
Set up key-based SSH authentication to VSes.
Assuming you've spun up Ubuntu VMs, you can do
apt-get install iperf
Otherwise, if you are on RHEL or Centos:
yum install epel-release
yum install iperf
Private network traffic between VSes in SoftLayer is free so we'll prefer using that to public traffic for these tests. In order to create a private network between two VSes, enable VLAN spanning. You can do this through the SoftLayer portal at https://control.softlayer.com. Browse to Network > IP Management > VLANs and select the "Span" tab in the upper-right corner. Click the "On" radio button to enable spanning.
Modify /etc/hosts on both systems: ensure there is an entry for each system that maps its private IP address (the one on the 10.x.x.x network) to the hostname for the system. You may wish to comment out the public IP address so there is no confusion. Here’s an example of mine:
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
# 169.54.196.228 Dallas-DataXfer.peterr.com Dal-DataXfer
10.121.154.4 Dallas-DataXfer.peterr.com dal-dataxfer
10.67.63.26 Singapore-DataXfer.peterr.com sng-dataxfer
Check connectivity between systems with ping.
On one of the systems, start the iperf server:
iperf -s
You should see output like this:
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
At the end of part 1, you started an iperf server on one of your systems. On the other of your two systems, use the iperf tool to connect to that server and perform a simple data transfer performance test and evaluate the output (note that this assumes the hostname of the listening server is dal-dataxfer):
root@SNG-DataXfer:~# iperf -c dal-dataxfer
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to dal-dataxfer, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 23.5 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 3] local 10.67.63.26 port 51449 connected with 10.121.154.4 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.9 sec 78.0 MBytes 59.8 Mbits/sec
This test used a single thread, it opened a socket to the server over port 5001 and tested throughput (note that this test only involves network equipment speed, it doesn't test computation speed and it doesn't use any storage systems).
Browse to the iperf website, https://iperf.fr, and learn about the tool's features.
Using the iperf tool, perform transfer performance tests and record your results with 1, 3, 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100 concurrent threads. Of specific interest in the output is the [SUM] line: this is a calculation of data throughput among all threads. Your iperf invocation will look something like this:
iperf -c <server-hostname> -P n