Pete's Stag Do

I spent a week training our staff in India, it wasn't really "LoadRunner Training" more how to plan, execute and explain Performance Test results.

My tourist pics:

Stephen's India Visit

I just finished the rather painless task of upgrading my wireless router to use the DD-WRT firmware. See dd-wrt.com

Ages ago I tried OpenWRT but at the time it didn't have the wireless secruity I wanted. The upgrade from OpenWRT to DD-WRT was easy and at first I had the Linksys router acting as a wireless client bridge (using WPA TKIP) to my Sky broadband Netgear router.

With DD-WRT, the Netgear box displayed the same problem as my office DELL D630 - it kept dropping the wireless link.

At first I had it setup like thishttp://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/images/3/3a/ ... _large.jpg

In the end I followed the instructions here and now I'm running a wireless network with two access points. One on the Netgear (Sky Firmware) and one on the Linksys (DD-WRT firmware).

DD-WRT makes the linksys box is quite extensible and I might make further use of it as a print server.

I do like the idea of replaying logs as performance tests, this got me thinking:
http://www.igvita.com/2008/09/30/load-t ... og-replay/

When Steve Hedley and I did the ATM Service Management system performance testing, we took a recording of the service requests set by 7000 ATM's, parsed them and scaled them up to be 20,000 ATM's.

Record live system log, then tweak it to be input to a test system performance test.

I keep reading articles about Performance Testing in Virtualised Environments, like this one:
http://virtualization.sys-con.com/node/697934
which I spotted here on http://twitter.com

The common theme I'm seeing is that the authors are documenting Performance Testing good practices or experiences which is not specific to Virtualised Environments.

Certainly there are authors considering the performance testing of virtualised systems: http://blogs.intel.com/idf/2008/08/virt ... ce_tes.php

But I am wondering if the performance tester needs to consider doing things differently when all or part of their system under test is virtualised?

Certainly I spend more time on the monitoring front:
1. Monitor the physical server(s) machine stats, minimum of Network, CPU and Memory.
2. Monitor the virtual server(s) machine stats, minimum of Network, CPU and Memory.
3. Think about the counters/stats provided by virtualisation server (application)

I always speak to the application experts (which seem to be few and far between) to ask what performance stats they are interested in.

The system should have a set of performance requirements at a business level, use these to drive the load that is applied and don't treat virtualised performance testing like something that is wildly different to physical system performance testing.