Run IOMeter on an Azure Linux VM with Azure Premium Storage

I had to do some IO testing for a customer with Azure Premium Storage. I was able to get some numbers using this command:
dd if=/dev/zero of=test.dat bs=1M count=10000;rm –f test.dat
However, wouldn’t it be cool if we could use the same IOmeter as Windows users in Linux? Well, it turns out this is actually possible!
I first created a 4 disk RAID 0 array on my DS3 size VM using these instructions: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-linux-configure-raid/
Once I had my RAID array, I then followed the instructions to add GNOME to my Linux VM: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cloud_solution_architect/archive/2015/05/02/remote-desktop-to-your-linux-azure-virtual-machine.aspx
I used CentOS 7.1 from the Azure VM Gallery. Unfortunately, it turns out that you can’t just sudo yum install wine to get Windows application support in Linux because IOMeter is a 32-bit Win32 application and CentOS 7.1 only supports 64-bit Windows apps out of the box.
This Wiki article talks about how to install IOMeter on Linux: http://www.linuxintro.org/wiki/Iometer. However, there are a few issues with it. Here’s what I did:
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/iometer/iometer-stable/2006-07-27/iometer-2006_07_27.linux.i386-bin.tgz
tar xvzf iometer-2006_07_27.linux.i386-bin.tgz
cd iometer-2006_07_27.linux.i386-bin
cd src
chmod +x dynamo
sudo yum install ld-linux.so.2
sudo yum install libstdc++.so.6
sudo ./dynamo
This guide talks about how to install Wine on CentOS 6 (also works on 7.1): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20971960/the-right-way-to-install-wine-on-centos-6-64bit. Here’s what I did:
1) Open another terminal window
2) Type this in the command window to download the Wine source:
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/wine/Source/wine-1.7.42.tar.bz2
3) Type these commands in the terminal window:
# sudo yum -y groupinstall 'Development Tools'
# sudo yum -y install libX11-devel freetype-devel
# sudo yum install alsa-lib-devel.i686 libsndfile-devel.i686 readline-devel.i686 glib2.i686 glibc-devel.i686 libgcc.i686 libstdc++-devel.i686 pulseaudio-libs-devel.i686 cmake portaudio-devel.i686 openal-soft-devel.i686 audiofile-devel.i686 freeglut-devel.i686 lcms-devel.i686 libieee1284-devel.i686 openldap-devel.i686 unixODBC-devel.i686 sane-backends-devel.i686 fontforge libgphoto2-devel.i686 isdn4k-utils-devel.i686 mesa-libGL-devel.i686 mesa-libGLU-devel.i686 libXxf86dga-devel.i686 libXxf86vm-devel.i686 giflib-devel.i686 cups-devel.i686 gsm-devel.i686 libv4l-devel.i686 fontpackages-devel ImageMagick-devel.i686 openal-soft-devel.i686 libX11-devel.i686 docbook-utils-pdf libtextcat tex-cm-lgc
# sudo yum install alsa-lib-devel audiofile-devel.i686 audiofile-devel cups-devel.i686 cups-devel dbus-devel.i686 dbus-devel fontconfig-devel.i686 fontconfig-devel freetype.i686 freetype-devel.i686 freetype-devel giflib-devel.i686 giflib-devel lcms-devel.i686 lcms-devel libICE-devel.i686 libICE-devel libjpeg-turbo-devel.i686 libjpeg-turbo-devel libpng-devel.i686 libpng-devel libSM-devel.i686 libSM-devel libusb-devel.i686 libusb-devel libX11-devel.i686 libX11-devel libXau-devel.i686 libXau-devel libXcomposite-devel.i686 libXcomposite-devel libXcursor-devel.i686 libXcursor-devel libXext-devel.i686 libXext-devel libXi-devel.i686 libXi-devel libXinerama-devel.i686 libXinerama-devel libxml2-devel.i686 libxml2-devel libXrandr-devel.i686 libXrandr-devel libXrender-devel.i686 libXrender-devel libxslt-devel.i686 libxslt-devel libXt-devel.i686 libXt-devel libXv-devel.i686 libXv-devel libXxf86vm-devel.i686 libXxf86vm-devel mesa-libGL-devel.i686 mesa-libGL-devel mesa-libGLU-devel.i686 mesa-libGLU-devel ncurses-devel.i686 ncurses-devel openldap-devel.i686 openldap-devel openssl-devel.i686 openssl-devel zlib-devel.i686 pkgconfig sane-backends-devel.i686 sane-backends-devel xorg-x11-proto-devel glibc-devel.i686 prelink fontforge flex bison libstdc++-devel.i686 pulseaudio-libs-devel.i686 gnutls-devel.i686 libgphoto2-devel.i686 openal-soft-devel openal-soft-devel.i686 isdn4k-utils-devel.i686 gsm-devel.i686 samba-winbind libv4l-devel.i686 cups-devel.i686 libtiff-devel.i686 gstreamer-devel.i686 gstreamer-plugins-base-devel.i686 gettext-devel.i686 libmpg123-devel.i686
$mkdir wine64
$ cd wine64
$ ../wine-1.7.42/configure –enable-win64
$ make
$ cd ..
$ mkdir wine32
$ cd wine32
$ ../wine-1.7.42/configure –with-wine64=../wine64
$ make
# sudo make install
# cd ../wine64
# sudo make install
$cd wine32
$wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/iometer/iometer-stable/2006-07-27/iometer-2006.07.27.win32.i386-setup.exe
$wine iometer-2006.07.27.win32.i386-setup.exe
$ cd “.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Iometer.org/Iometer 2006.07.27″
$sudo Iometer.exe
Once IOMeter launched, I selected my RAID disk for each of the workers:

With a 4K Read Access Specification for each worker thread: (Note: Host cache for each data disk was set to none; these are not official benchmarks and are specific to my environment)

This is actually a littler better than the DS3 VM Specification:

The same test on a scaled up DS 13 with the same 4 disk RAID 0 array: