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Orion是Oracle推出的一款存储测试工具，通过模拟Oracle数据库的IO请求方式来测试存储的性能，很早之前piner就推荐过。从我们的实际使用经验来看，orion的测试结果还是比较符合实际情况的。但是也发现过一些问题，尤其是AIX版本的，测试结果受cache的干扰比较严重，无法将压力压到最终的物理硬盘上去，而Linux版本的一直都还是比较准确的。

最近Oracle对orion做了更新，版本号升级到了11.1.0.7，和数据库的版本号保持一致了。虽然Oracle在网站上声明不对该工具提供支持，但看起来还是比较重视的，不过orion确实是一款不可多得的存储测试工具，尤其是测试随机IO的方法，是经得住实践的考验的。只是一直没有推出HP-UX版本的，这次依然没有，用HP的兄弟们就要有点遗憾了。

有兴趣的朋友，可以从这里下载最新的版本，只是文档一直都是老版本，很长时间都没有更新过了，但是参数都一样，改的应该都是一些bug和内部算法，所以文档是否更新不那么重要了。

Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

Oracle Orion is a tool to help predict performance of I/O loads on Oracle databases. Orion is specifically designed for simulating and predicting I/O bottlenecks against Oracle databases. Oracle Orion is available for free download at this link. Please note that Oracle Orion is not supported by Oracle:

The unsupported Oracle Orion disk I/O load utility only seems to work for raw devices on Linux and only runs on Windows and Linux, and this severely limits its usefulness as the majority of clients seem to be using OCFS or a CFS such as Veritas on Linux.

We tested it against the RAID0 set on our server, and against two regular file system disks, both gave back “Non test error occurred – Orion exiting” after the initial startup messages stating how long the test would take.

You can only do Orion read tests with disks you don’t want to write over as the write test will write over all data on the volumes you want to test according to the documentation. This appears to be a very dangerous tool for example if you specified the write test at a client site you could ruin their installation. Also, clients probably won’t have RAWs just laying around to test against.

The Orion utility is more for setting up new systems, but only if they get it to use regular file systems instead of RAW only.