Virtualization and Cloud Computing: Overview

Integrating virtualization within a host and across a data center requires careful planning and thorough testing to ensure that the functionality, performance, security and reliability of applications and data is not compromised. Virtualization removes the traditional silos between server, storage and network, making it critical to test in the context of an end-to-end environment, and address key 'hot spots' illustrated below.

Testing a virtual device, as well the impact of virtualization on the performance of the physical host and applications requires purpose-built tools that have visibility into the virtual environment. It is equally important that these tools be integrated within a unified solution capable of making measurements across the end-to-end data center.

Ixia: The only unified test platform for converged data centers

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 virtualization across the data center. 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.

Ixia's Virtualization Solution, which is part of Ixia's unified Data Center Solution, features:

• Integration with popular virtualization platforms for automatic discovery of virtual infrastructure
• Software-based test ports that are easy to add and remove and quickly scale or change test configurations
• L2/3 protocol emulation and traffic to measure IP protocol funcationality and convergence in virtual environments, including QoS, VM migration, VLAN leakage and IGMP group join/leave latency
• Stateful L4-7 traffic generation to assess the a virtual or physical device with a realistic mixture of inter-VM application and data storage traffic
• Best in class I/O storage testing for Converged Network Adapter Manufacturers
• Analysis tools to validate policy enforcement, port mirroring and VLAN trunking capabilities

Use Ixia's test solutions to:

• 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 ports 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 effects storage I/O
  • 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 Linux 5.3 machines - no custom appliances required
• Fully compatible with Ixia hardware ports and streams
• Flexible licensing (per physical server or by virtual appliance)
• Automatic asset discovery facilitates testing across both private and public cloud infrastructure

Select a link below to see how Ixia's Virtualization Test Solution can help you:

• Server/Virtualized Server
• Converged Network Adapter (CNA)