Throughput rate testing configurations

[Steve Bertrand]

Hi everyone,

I see what I believe to be less-than-adequate communication performance 
between many devices in parts of our network.

Can someone recommend software (and config recommendations if possible) 
that I can implement to test both throughput and pps reliably, 
initially/primarily in a simple host-sw-host configuration?

Perhaps I'm asking too much, but I'd like to have something that can 
push the link to it's absolute maximum capacity (for now, up to 1Gbps) 
for a long sustained time, that I can just walk away from and let it do 
it's work, and review the reports later where it had to scale down due 
to errors.

What I'm really trying to achieve is:

- test the link between hosts alone
- throw in a switch
- test the link while r/w to disk
- test the link while r/w to GELI disk
- test the link with oddball MTU sizes

...and see what impact occurs in each scenario, to be able to tell where 
things can be improved.

All machines that will be part of this test will be either 6.3 or 7.

Steve