Stress Testing during Proof of Concept

[chriskranz]

Following on a little from Brendon's question. VDI is still very new in itself, throw into the mix all the brilliant features that NetApp bring to the table and the project becomes unknown territory for the customer. So we usually end up deploying a system into a Proof of Concept environment to show how well it works and how well it copes with the load

What sort of stress testing tools would you recommend during a PoC? If we are deploying 1000's of users, how do we test the load of 1000's of users on the system? What is a good way to measure virtual users experience?

[treyl · Accepted solution]

Chris

I have had customers simulate I/O with the sio tool on the now site, in the toolchest.   In one particular environment they wrote a autologin script for each VM (meaning that when the desktop booted, a simulated user auto logged in).   Within the users login script it called the sio tool to begin I/O generatation for a defined period of time, pause,  and then initiate I/O again. 

The customer would basically power on virtual desktops and the script would be called as the simulated I/O user callled on the script.   The testing worked very well.  The thing I like about the SIO tool is that it is very simple to understand and very easy to call upon in a logon script.

Trey

[chriskranz]

I don't suppose there would be any chance of getting some examples of this? Or perhaps a downloadable appliance that could be configured + deployed to do some stress testing?

Having a pre-packaged virtual appliance to do this would be fantastic!

Thanks for the answers though, makes perfect sense to be honest!