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Vulcan Knowledge Base
Overview
Xena L4-7 Testing Architecture
Different from L2-3 packet/stream blasting, VulcanManager establishes stateful TCP connections between two test ports to test the performance of the device under test (DUT). Thus, there is no concept of streams in VulcanManager, which commonly is found in L2-3 testing, but connections/sessions instead. One TCP connection consists of a pair of sockets, a client IP, a client port number, a server IP, and a server port number. There are some vital concepts used in VulcanManager.
End-to-End Testing
Xena L4-7 test platform provides an end-to-end solution for stateful testing. Each test scenario requires two test ports to emulate users and servers. The two ports on Xena L4-7 chassis communicate with each other in an end-to-end fashion, that is, connections between the two ports are end-to-end established.
Xena L4-7 end-to-end stateful test solution
Subnet and Users
Subnet is a very important concept in VulcanManager. A subnet contains a range of consecutive IP addresses and is presented by a Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) block, e.g. 10.0.0.0/8 or 16.0.0.0/16. After being configured, a subnet can be assigned a role as Client Subnet or Server Subnet for a specific test. VulcanManager allows you to define subnets and configure test scenarios according to actual requirements.
- Client Subnet Role
Client Subnet is used only by the client side. All the IP addresses in the Client Subnet will play the roles of clients when establishing TCP connections, which transmit TCP SYN packets. - Server Subnet Role
Server Subnet is used only by the server side. All the IP addresses in the Server Subnet will play the roles of servers when establishing TCP connections, which wait for TCP SYN packets and respond with TCP SYN-ACK packets.
User is another important concept in VulcanManager. A User, i.e. emulated user/client, represents one IP address in the Client Subnet. One User can have one or multiple ports assigned. Thus, the number of Users is always equal or less than the number of TCP connections. A typical example is that a User can emulate a PC in reality, where the PC is assigned only one IP address and communicates with servers using multiple ports.
