Network Performance Testing

Shunra integrated into HP Performance Center

Shunra announced recently that they've integrated with HP Performance Center 9.5.  The product is called Shunra VE Desktop for HP Software, and allows each load generator in the HP Performance Center to be setup to emulate different WAN conditions. From the press release: Some typical uses of Shunra VE Desktop for HP Software include the detection of: Latency impact – Latency causes the transactions and sessions to stay open longer than they would on the LAN. Without incorporating the WAN effects of delay into a load test the memory usage, thread usage, and other critical server resources can be significantly understated. Bandwidth limitations – Bandwidth constraints affect transactions "in-flight," causing them to take longer to complete their transmission and ultimately impacts important server resources. Network impact – Where specific response time goals are being targeted, it is important to incorporate the effect of the network into existing testing processes to examine the impact on total response time. Shunra enables you to accurately assess total response time for remote users prior to deployment and can analyze the breakdown of total response time into the client, network, and server components. This assists in diagnosing and resolving transactions that will not consistently meet response time goals. Looks like a pretty cool add-on for those of you out there with Performance Center.  I think testing with more real-world conditions like this is not just a nice-to-have anymore, but a requirement in today's test environments.

Shunra starts new blog

Shunra started a new blog called Application Performance Management which has posts from the CEO as well as other staff members. Some interesting posts so far - glad to see Shunra providing more community ties into their company. Looking forward to a lot of new posts and information. Application Performance Management - Shunra Software

Shunra Software Releases Shunra Virtual Enterprise for VMware

Virtualized stuff is always interesting to me, and I am glad to see at least one vendor who has put a lot of focus on adding features and functionality targeted to virtualized test efforts. Shunra has a decent summary page on how they work with VMware. It seems that you can emulate WAN conditions with VM images and Virtual Infrastructure, which would be extremely useful in testing apps and deployments. My company uses VI 3 and leverages a lot of VMware's technology to speed our testing process for many things. This will likely be a great tool for us to look into. Full press release here: Shunra Software Releases Shunra Virtual Enterprise for VMware Infrastructure 3

Leaders in IP Testing Announce the First Multivendor, Open Automation

A huge list of vendors today announced a partnership to collaborate on an open, multi-vendor solution for test automation, called TesLA. It seems to be led by IXIA, but there are some other big names along with them:

• Apcon
• Codenomicon
• Fanfare
• IXIA
• MuDynamics
• QualiSystems
• Shunra

It sounds too good to be true - a single framework for managing all of these types of devices from all of these vendors. I hope others will join as well so that we're not stuck with just one choice for some of these areas... I think this is a great idea, and I look forward to seeing the results of this sort of collaboration - I'm actually quite surprised that some of these folks are working together, since they have competing (somewhat) products. I am sure a solution like this won't work for everyone, and I am hoping folks in the alliance will consider the highly customizable nature of this sort of testing, and make sure their solutions keep that aspect in mind - many of us have needs to use our own external <insert whatever it is here> and will need a lot of flexibility in customizing any centralized tool to manage things. Full press release can be found here: Press Releases :: Ixia - Leader in IP Performance Testing