I'm trying to figure out the peak load I can sustain on new hardware I procured for validating backups and performing DBCC checks. I've been using Crystal Diskmark to get throughput stats which helped me benchmark sequential I/O for the copy/restore tasks. I'm having trouble gauging how much random I/O I can sustain for the DBCC check. I'm thinking about using iometer and sqliosim but want to know config would work best to simulate a DBCC check.
The hardware I'm testing consists of one R720 with dual E5-2609s for 8 cores, 32 GB RAM, Windows 2008 R2 Standard, SQL Server 2008 R2 Standard with SP2, and a PowerVault 3620f with 24 15k SAS spindles hooked up to two dual port HBAs on the R720. I've been experimenting with 4, 8 and 12 spindle RAID 0 groups (I can afford to lose the fault tolerance as the DBs have a life expectancy of minutes as part of the testing process).
I'm thinking I can run multiple simultaneous DBCC checks with the above hardware without hitting disk contention. I have the option to upgrade the RAM to 64 GB and the O/S to Enterprise but probably can't upgrade the SQL to Enterprise due to licensing costs.
Any suggestions on how to determine the max random I/O for DBCC using iometer, sqliosim or another utility would be deeply appreciated.
