IxVM

Cloud computing is creating a new paradigm of user experience with the online applications users employ. Users expect immediate access to a wide range of media-rich applications and services, instantly, from any location. Virtualization makes more efficient and flexible use of data center resources, but in doing so, they also increase the workload and complexity of server architecture and network infrastructure, and put new and significant demands on both resources.

Integrating virtualization within a host and across a data center is key to creating a functional and adaptable cloud network, and requires careful planning and thorough testing to ensure functionality, performance, security, and reliability of applications and devices.

Ixia's virtualization test solution accelerates time-to-market, improves confidence and maximizes ROI by providing the only unified product portfolio with the flexibility and breadth of applications required to assess the impact of server virtualization across the data.

Ixia's IxVM product family is specifically designed to test virtualized assets and environments while leveraging trusted tools that have been used for testing hardware-based network equipment for over a decade. IxVM virtual ports provide a software-based version of a traditional Ixia hardware port that can be deployed in a virtualized environment. Virtual ports support Ixia software applications and can be combined with hardware ports to thoroughly test all aspects of the virtualized server and the impact of virtualization on the broader data center performance.

Key Features

• Test the most critical components of the virtual switch, including functionality, conformance to standards, and performance
• Compare how different hypervisors, virtual appliances and configurations impact server performance
• Functional validation of application-ware devices such as virtual firewalls, ADCs, storage servers, and other application servers
• Validate CNA throughput and I/O performance
• Measure intra-server and inter-server VM traffic exchange performance
• Validate critical functionality including VLAN, IGMP, policy enforcement and security
• Assess how VM mobility impacts application reliability and performance
• Evaluate the performance from different server suppliers
• Accelerate time to market by conducting functional test early in the development lifecycle
• Compare performance of different blade servers, hypervisors, virtual switches and appliances using Ixia's test wizards, industry-leading automation and performance benchmarking test suites
• Improve confidence by testing in the context of the intended data center deployment and isolate performance issues:
  • IxVM cards can be deployed as complete virtual appliance or directly on bare metal hardware to test using customized VMs and applications and specific operating environments
  • Unified data center solution emulates real-world end-to-end data center conditions so you can assess the overall impact of data center virtualization, including how VM scale and mobility affects application performance
  • Multi-level statistics correlate measurements from the virtual infrastructure with measurements from physical and virtual NICs (on both sides of the hypervisors) so you can quickly identify and address sources of errors and performance degradation
• Maximize return on your test investment using a scalable, unified test platform for complete device and data center characterization
• Installs directly on Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems - no custom appliances required
• Compatible with Ixia hardware ports and streams
• Flexible floating licensing allows IxVM cards to be dynamically deployed anywhere in the lab
• Automatic asset discovery facilitates testing across both private and public cloud infrastructure

IxNetwork

IxNetwork is designed to test network infrastructure, capacity, scalability, and convergence using scaled protocol emulation. IxNetwork running over IxVM provides a flexible deployment of Ixia traffic generator and protocol emulation to perform wide scale functional testing of L23 devices. Using Virtual Load Modules, IxNetwork running over IxVM also offers the unique ability to benchmark the performance of virtualized servers by simulating data center traffic between VMs.

IxLoad

IxLoad performs L4-7 application testing for a wide variety of virtualized application architectures. Using Virtual Load Modules, IxLoad running over VM will soon be extended with client disk I/O emulation, allowing complete performance testing of 10GE converged network adapters (CNAs).