Exchange 2016: Testing storage performance with Jetstress (comparison of NTFS to ReFS) Part 1

Jetstress is excellent for testing the storage for Exchange. I used it to see how NTFS and ReFS behave in terms of speed.

There is no official version of Jetstress for Exchange 2016 yet, but the Jetstress version for Exchange 2013 also works with Exchange 2016.

Jetstress can be downloaded here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36849

After installing jetstress, a few files need to be copied into the jetstress directory. The first 5 files can be found in the unpacked Exchange 2016 installation sources in the directory \setup\serverroles\common\perf\amd64:

The other two files can be found in the Exchange installation directory under \bin:

These 7 files must be copied into the Jetstress installation directory. Jetstress can now be started:

After the first start, restart immediately and you are ready to go:

My test server is a VM on VMware ESX 5.5 and Windows Server 2012 R2 as the operating system. The VM has two additional hard disks with 100 GB each. One is formatted with NTFS (64KB), the other with ReFS. The settings in Jetstress are the same in each case. Here are the settings

The test lasts 2 hours:

First run on the NTFS volume, the second run then takes place with ReFS

and wait...

I did the test once each with an NTFS and a ReFS volume. Here are the preliminary results:

ReFS:

NTFS:

The results are provisional for the time being, because I will repeat the test again, as there seems to be something wrong with the storage. Because a few values quickly catch the eye here, for example:

• I/O: Average waiting time for database read operations (msec): NTFS around 2 msec, ReFS 32 msec????
• I/O: Database write operations/sec: NTFS 4500 EA/s ReFS: 3700 EA/s????

Incidentally, the storage had little base load during this time and averaged around 10,000 IOPS:

I'll take a closer look at the storage and repeat the test to see how it turns out. I'm a bit confused by the current values, further tests will follow, including from the storage side.