Jul 14, 2011 Additional Blog Posts

Video: Testing Virtualized Applications on the Cisco UCS at Cisco LIVE 2011

by Kristi Thiele

Rolling out virtualized applications is a painful process, especially because the engineers doing it usually have no advance insight into how the applications will perform in production, or where the bottlenecks will be. Throughout the Cisco LIVE event in Las Vegas this week, we’ve been using the BreakingPoint CTM to show people how to gain that advance insight by performing live testing on a Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) right in our booth.

Cisco has also been using a BreakingPoint CTM to demonstrate the capabilities of the UCS in its own booth. These tests offer a great opportunity to show attendees how the BreakingPoint Data Center Resiliency Lab can help them better allocate resources to optimize their own virtualized environments. But if you’re not in Las Vegas this week, I thought I would show you a video of how we’ve been live-testing the UCS.

Putting Virtualized Applications to the Test

The 10-minute video below gives you a taste of our presentations. It starts with my colleague Scott Stevens explaining the capabilities of the BreakingPoint FireStorm CTM to the audience. Then I walk everyone through a test as it’s running against the UCS, showing how the Data Center Resiliency Lab ramps up simulated users until the virtualized environment can no longer maintain adequate quality of experience (QoE) metrics — in this case, while running 16 VMs.

As you’ll see in the video, we also touch on resource allocation, latency, and our detailed reporting capabilities. We even show VMware statistics running in parallel with our own measurements.

These topics really hit home with our audience. Based on my audience polls, most people can’t currently optimize and rightsize their application rollouts because they don't have the right tool to help them do it.

Take a look at the video and feel free to ask your own questions in the comments below.