Server Load Balancer Testing Methodology Published

This morning we published our latest methodology for realistic testing of server load balancers. Server load balancers are such an integral piece of networking equipment and the adoption of virtualization and cloud computing, as well as the overall increase of network load, have made them an even hotter topic. As with our firewall testing and IPS testing methodologies, the server load balancer testing methodology demonstrates, in great detail including screenshots, how to configure a load balancer and set up the testing tools.

Some highlights from the methodology:

• Testing the number of TCP connections per second the load balancer is able to handle, providing a baseline test of the device’s performance capabilities.
• Emulating blended Layer 4-7 application traffic in order to validate that the load balancer can handle a true network scenario.
• Determining the overall bandwidth the load balancer can support through testing the number of HTTP/HTTPs connections per second the device can handle.
• Simulating dynamic pages and image files to validate HTTP Caching performance and confirm the load balancer is locally caching needed files.
• Confirming the load balancer can handle malformed packets or errors with the packet through application fuzzing.
• Testing RFCs 793, 1945, 2616, 2818, and 3501.

In the news release that went out today the quote from our CTO and co-founder, Dennis Cox summed it up nicely:

“Server load balancers are so important to today’s network infrastructure, helping to provide improved service uptime, redundancy and better application performance. In order to make this happen, server load balancers must have a high level of awareness of application protocols traversing the network, provide local caching and handle a significant amount of simultaneous TCP connections. Now add onto this the influx of virtualization, and today’s server load balancers have become highly complex content-aware devices that help to optimize your network and the applications it is running. Yet traditional testing methodologies, which only call for testing with HTTP traffic, are still being used."

"Simply testing server load balancers with HTTP is unsuitable and irresponsible. True performance and security testing requires realistic and blended application traffic, appropriate throughput and even anomalies such as application fuzzing. The more realistic testing you do today, the better performing and more secure server load balancer you’ll see tomorrow.”

Go check out the Server Load Balancer testing methodology and let us know what you think.

Posted by Kyle Flaherty

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