Help me monitoring the IO for remote server

Hi guys i have purchased sun server for my visualization project.

Request you to help me finding the io for disk .

I have put storage(disks) on different location (File Server) and on server (Application) i have configured 4 virtual machines.

How would i monitor the io for file server from the Application server where i have configured 4 virtual machine.

one way to mount the file server share on application server and execute

dd if=/dev/zero of=/share/test.out bs=1024 count=1024

to check the read and write .

Is there any other way of doing this.

I hope i didnt confused any 1.