News
Ixia to Test and Demonstrate a Fully Virtualised Data Centre with Virtual Security Elements
August 2011 by Marc Jacob
Ixia, the provider of converged IP and wireless network test solutions, will unveil IxLoad-VM – a solution for testing virtualised data centres and their infrastructures. IxLoad-VM measures the quality and capacity of cloud data centre components, applications and networks to deliver effective cloud-based services. At VMWorld 2011, Las Vegas from August 29 to September 1 at booth #1347, Ixia will use IxLoad-VM and other Ixia products to demonstrate the testing of a fully virtualised data centre with virtual security elements, virtual router/switch nodes and actual web infrastructure.
Application virtualisation in a cloud environment is a compelling solution with economic, flexibility and capacity benefits for enterprises of all sizes. The shared and distributed nature of cloud computing components, however, makes it extremely difficult to predict requirements and optimise performance. In order to measure the true capacity and quality of virtualised applications and infrastructures, a new and unique testing approach is required.
The IxLoad-VM solution assesses application performance across the virtualised data centre in conjunction with IxNetwork-VM, which assesses layer 2/3 network performance in virtual environments. IxLoad-VM uses “virtual test ports,” which are virtualised software implementations of its award-winning Ethernet test equipment. Ixia’s virtual test ports measure true quality of experience (QoE) and capacity using real-world application and storage area network (SAN) traffic from virtualised hosts. Traffic generation and measurement from virtual machines (VMs) correctly characterises each application and virtual data centre component. An additional test solution, IxLoad-VDI, determines the true capacity of virtual desktop servers by emulating large numbers of virtual desktop clients.
The combination of Ixia’s virtualised test solutions provide the essential tools to ensure that cloud service will perform with high availability and security, allowing enterprises and cloud providers to independently validate service level agreements (SLAs). Ixia’s virtual tools isolate portions of the virtual data centre to pinpoint security flaws, performance bottlenecks and operational issues.
Key Facts:
· IxLoad-VM and its companion product, IxNetwork-VM, are an economic, yet powerful, means of testing networking and processing components during development. Their low-cost, full-layer 2-7 test capabilities make them the perfect product for every development and quality assurance engineer.
· IxLoad-VM’s virtual test ports operate from within the virtual machines on virtualised hosts, providing capacity and quality measurements of:
o Virtual switch performance
o Virtualised services as accessed from the same or different hosts
o Cloud data centre network performance
o SAN performance, including converged network adapters (CNAs), fibre channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and storage arrays
· Virtual Desktop infrastructures are tested with IxLoad-VDI, which works with customised scripts to emulate real-world user behaviour. Large communities invoking scripts are used to quickly determine realistic virtual desktop server capacity.
· IxLoad-I/O is a virtual test port option that generates large-scale I/O traffic from within a VM in order to test the performance of CNAs, converged Ethernet/fibre channel networks and storage area networks (SANs).
