Windows Disk stress

Windows disk stress injects disk stress into a Windows OS based VM, by consuming and exhausting the disk resources on the target Windows machine.

Use cases

Windows disk stress:

• Simulates a lack of disk for processes running on the application, causing performance degradation and system slowdowns.
• Simulates slow application traffic or resource exhaustion, leading to degradation in the performance of processes on the machine.

Prerequisites

• Ensure that the prerequisites are fulfilled before executing the experiment.

External packages

This fault uses Diskspd, which is installed as part of the infrastructure installation.

Mandatory tunables

Tunable	Description	Notes
MEMORY_CONSUMPTION	Amount of stress applied on target Windows VM (in MB).	Default: 1024.

Optional tunables

Tunable	Description	Notes
BLOCK_SIZE_IN_KILOBYTES	Data block size used to fill the disk (in KB).	Default: 128.
WRITE_PERCENTAGE	Percentage of total disk write.	Default: 100.
NUMBER_OF_WORKERS	Number of workers used to run the stress process.	Default: 2.
DISK_PATH	Path in the Windows VM to apply stress.	Default: C:\.
DURATION	Duration that you specify, through which chaos is injected into the target resource (in seconds).	Default: 30s. For more information, go to duration of the chaos.
RAMP_TIME	Period to wait before and after injecting chaos (in seconds).	For example, 30 s. For more information, go to ramp time.

Parameters

Following YAML snippet illustrates the use of the input variables described earlier.

apiVersion: litmuchaos.io/v1alpha1
kind: MachineFault
metadata:
  name: windows-disk-stress
  labels:
    name: disk-stress
spec:
  infraType: windows
  env:
    - name: MEMORY_CONSUMPTION
      value: "1024"
    - name: BLOCK_SIZE_IN_KILOBYTES
      value: "128"
    - name: WRITE_PERCENTAGE
      value: "100"
    - name: NUMBER_OF_WORKERS
      value: "2"
    - name: DISK_PATH
      value: "C:\\"
    - name: DURATION
      value: "30s"
    - name: RAMP_TIME  # optional tunable
      value: ""