Ixia announced its expansion into virtual network and virtualization testing. Legacy network resources are straight-forward to isolate, balance and test. However, new virtual infrastructure makes it extremely challenging to isolate the network functions and bottlenecks and data center managers need to evaluate system performance under load.
Ixia said its new IxVM product enables data center managers to assess virtual infrastructure performance and capacity. IxVM builds on the company's library of layer 2-7 performance test tools that discover, manage and automate testing in large virtualized environments. The IxVM products can test layer 2/3 virtual network resources and layer 4-7 virtual applications.
IxChariot VM, a component of IxVM, uses software endpoints -- small software components that run on each virtual machine -- that send and receive test traffic, while measuring performance. This makes it possible to source traffic from virtual servers in the same manner as the supported applications. IxExplorer VM uses software endpoints to generate layer 2/3 traffic to test features such as VLAN and QoS.
IxVM allows:
- performance testing of thousands of VMs simultaneously with real world application traffic
- independent measurement and convergence testing of VM migration
- tuning of virtual resources such as servers and NICs
- measurement of key performance indicators like delay, jitter or packet loss through virtual switches
- testing of network performance variances when running applications over different operating systems
