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Super friendly

Xena’s L4-7 test platform is the industry’s easiest to deploy. Here are some examples:

• The software is native to Windows, and can be freely downloaded from the Internet. Double-click to launch, enter an IP address and a password, and you are ready to test.
• Centralized upgrades make it quick and easy to install the latest software across multiple testers for immediate access to the newest features and bug fixes.
• All devices can be administered from the same user-friendly GUI to ensure fast, efficient testing – without the big learning curve that go with our competitors’ products.
• To make remote testing even easier, Xena offers Phantom – a browser-based (HTML5) user-interface that lets engineers access their test system from any OS.
• Xena’s L4-7test solutions are also ready for virtualization ensuring low-cost future-proof migration to cloud-based testing.

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L4-7 Hardware

VulcanBay offers extreme performance Gigabit TCP test chassis for stateful traffic load testing, analysis and characterization of Ethernet equipment and network infrastructure.

VulcanBay:
This 19” rack-mountable chassis has 28 Packet Engines and comes in three port configurations: 12x10GE ports, 12x25GE ports or a combination of 8x25GE + 2x40GE ports. Speeds are enabled via upgradeable licenses.

Massive Performance Testing:

Xena’s L4-7 test platform delivers blistering performance and capacity. This means
realistic 1G/2.5G/5G/10G/25G/40G traffic generation:

• 24 million Concurrent Connections (CC)*
• 6 million Connections Per Second (CPS)**
• 1.2 million Concurrent TLS Sessions, 14,000 TLS Sessions Per Second
• 6 million HTTP Connections Per Second, 7 million HTTP Transactions Per Second (TPS)***
• Capture capacity: 40 million x 128 bytes buffers / 4 million full-size buffers

* 24M TCP Clients and 24M TCP Servers on one XenaScale
** Measured at 1M CC per 10G port
*** Measured at 10 transactions per connection

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L4-7 Software

Included with VulcanBay chassis is a valuable portfolio of software. You also receive one year’s free software maintenance, plus of course the option for extending licensing.

VulcanManager
	VulcanManager is a Windows-based GUI used to configure, generate and analyze traffic via the L4-7 hardware. It is used for application emulation, testing TLS, performance verification, load testing, analysis and characterization of Ethernet equipment and network infrastructure. This includes firewalls, switches, routers, NAT routers, proxies, load-balancers, bandwidth shapers, and more.
VulcanAppMix
	VulcanAppMix (VAM) is a library of application traffic and protocols in pcap format. VAM makes it easy to set up large-scale realistic traffic from various applications, using pre-defined and customizable mix templates. Up to 200 pre-defined application scenarios can be played simultaneously, each covering a one-client-to-multiple-servers communications scenario that can be scaled up to millions of connections with real-world traffic.
ValkyrieCLI
	ValkyrieCLI is a free text-based Command Line Interface (CLI) API that makes test automation on Xena testers easy to script from any scripting environment that supports TCP/IP. You can download it from Xena’s website.

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APPLICATIONS

 

TLS Middlebox Performance Testing

Testing TLS performance is vital for balancing security and performance. It is essential that the test equipment can get the encrypted TLS traffic through the DUT that is operating in the TLS middlebox/proxy mode. Otherwise, the test will be invalid.

Adopting the latest encryption standard, Xena TLS gives users high-performance test solutions that can reveal the performance bottleneck of their TLS/HTTPS middleboxes/proxies, address security performance testing requirements, and optimize their security parameters.

Key test parameters are:

• TLS handshake per second
• TLS throughput
• HTTPS connection per second
• HTTPS transactions per second
• TLS record size optimization
• TLS cipher suites and key size impact

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Application Emulation and Advanced Replay

The Vulcan L4-7 test platform delivers highly scalable application emulation based on a pre-defined library of application traffic and protocols called VulcanAppMix. Enabled in VulcanManager, up to 200 pre-defined application scenarios can be played simultaneously, each covering one-to-many communication scenarios that can scale up to millions of connections with real-world traffic.

With pre-defined traffic mixes for specific segments e.g. enterprise and finance, users can test DUT throughput performance, which can vary dramatically under different traffic profiles.

Users can also replay their own pcap files on the DUT to verify performance and validate network behavior, using Xena advanced Layer 4 replay function. Being able to choose different replay modes, users can reconstruct the real-world scenarios, or create their own traffic mixes for realistic throughput verification.

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Connection-Oriented Traffic Generation

TCP connections can be customized by modifying the MAC/IP/TCP headers to create variations in the generated packets. Traffic rates are specified as a percentage of line rate, frames per second or bit-rate, and traffic generation is controlled by a load profile specifying the speed with which connections are established and terminated. The TCP payload can be automatically generated (random, incrementing) or customized. Payloads can also be loaded from files and different congestion control algorithms can be used to test network behavior.

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Transaction-based Traffic Generation

The Vulcan L4-7 test platform provides great flexibility for users to emulate transaction-based traffic based on the request-response communication model. With the customizable HTTP template and configuration transactions per TCP connection, users can create millions of HTTP transactions for HTTP capacity testing, e.g. HTTP connections per second, HTTP transactions per second, and HTTP throughput at various response sizes.

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Lab-based Performance Testing

The Vulcan L4-7 test platform is ideal for validating network device performance in development and production environments. High port density means large port-count test beds can be set up at a fraction of the cost of existing test solutions with test topologies ranging from L2 forwarding such switches, over packet routing, to caching and network application servers. These can be tested individually or combined into functional networks.

Lab-based testing during development is used to load routers and other forwarding devices with large-scale, realistic stateful TCP sessions to verify forwarding performance. Key metrics are:

• maximum number of concurrent TCP connections (TCP CC),
• maximum connections per second (TCP CPS),
• maximum HTTP connections per second (HTTP CPS),
• maximum HTTP transactions per second (HTTP TPS),
• throughput and packet forwarding rates at various TCP segment sizes.

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Network Infrastructure Test

The Vulcan L4-7 test platform can do capacity and performance testing for service providers and large enterprise networks. Here the focus is less on the individual forwarding devices and servers and more on system-wide performance.

Examples of relevant parameters are optimal MSS, prioritization of different types of network traffic using Differentiated Services (DS) and other QoS mechanisms, and to verify guaranteed bandwidths according to SLAs. For carriers, testing is done to qualify performance before service roll out. Network infrastructure testing can also take place over large geographical distances requiring simultaneous control over multiple traffic generators.

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Ease of Use & Debug

The Vulcan L4-7 test platform is scalable and can be used to quickly and easily generate millions of TCP connections with specified load profiles and configurable IP/TCP/Payload parameters. Real time stats and test reports provide an in-depth overview of the DUT/SUT characteristics.

Vulcan L4-7 test modules are suited for multi-user environments at the level of per-port reservation. Packet Engines (PE’s) mean performance can be allocated individually depending on the test scenario, for full operational flexibility.

Enabling the capturing function, users can record communication traffic between test ports as a pcap file for in-depth analysis of the network behavior of the DUT/SUT.

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Wire-Speed Software Packet Processing

Xena’s L4-7 solutions use the state-of-the-art technologies in software-based packet processing. The platform is based on Intel x86-64 and achieves wire-speed performance using a combination of hardware-based offloading technologies, distributed processing and advanced algorithms.

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