Network Virtualization Overview

This section provides an overview of how Micro Focus Network Virtualization (NV) integrates with Performance Center to help you test point-to-point performance of network-deployed products under real-world conditions.

In this topic:

About Network Virtualization

By incorporating NV into your scenario, you can create more meaningful results by configuring several load generators or groups of Vusers with a unique set of network effects, depending on the route or location. For example, you could define a location from New York to London and another one from Los Angeles to New York. As a result of this, your scenario performs the test in a more realistic environment that better represents the actual deployment of your application.

After running a performance test, view the results in the Performance Test Run page or the LoadRunner Analysis. For details on the Performance Test Run page, see Performance test run page (online screen). For details on viewing results in Analysis, see the LoadRunner Help Center.

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Excluding Machines from Network Virtualization

In some situations, you may need to exclude certain machines that may affect the virtualization emulation, from the network virtualization . A typical example is a software update server.

To exclude a machine, you configure the IP Filter settings of your network virtualization software. When you exclude a machine, their network effects will not be included in the network virtualization results.

Which machines should you exclude? Any machine that if emulated, may affect the results of the actual scenario during its run, (for example, the Controller) should be excluded.

The following machines are excluded by default:

The following are situations to consider excluding a machine from network virtualization:

• In a Multi-protocol performance test that includes a web server and a database server; where information from the database server is not required as a part of the performance test. In such a case, you would exclude the database server.

• Deployment and software upgrade servers.

• Servers that run and store scripts on a shared network drive.

• MI Listener.

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Viewing Network Virtualization Graphs

Network Virtualization starts and stops automatically as you start and stop the performance test. Network Virtualization monitors are assigned automatically when the performance test run starts and metrics are automatically collected during the performance test run. You can view the network virtualization metrics during the performance test run in the Performance Test Run page. For details on the Performance Test Run page, see Performance test run page (online screen).

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NV Insights Report

By incorporating NV Insights into your scenario, you can create a comprehensive network analysis report that provides information about how your application performs over various types of networks (virtual locations). This standalone HTML report covers all of the workload groups in a single report. For more details, see NV Insights report.

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Installation

The Performance Center setup wizard prompts you to install NV at the conclusion of the installation. If you did not install the NV components as part of the Performance Center installation, you can run the NV installations manually at any time.

The installation files and guide are located in the <Performance Center installation directory>\Additional Components\Network Virtualization folder.

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Notes and limitations

This section describes notes and limitations for running Vusers with Network Virtualization.

• Network Virtualization is not supported when using elastic hosts.

• The bandwidth utilization measurement is represented in the graphs only when the bandwidth is configured as Shared Bandwidth. If the bandwidth is configured as Individual Bandwidth, bandwidth utilization data does not appear.

• You cannot run Network Virtualization while using a Goal-Oriented schedule.

• When installing the Network Virtualization driver on Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 SP1, and network adapters are configured as “Teaming” (also known as “LBFO”), the NV Agent crashes and the active adapter cannot be set.

  Resolution: See Software Self-solve knowledge base article KM03202619.

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See also

• Integrate Network Virtualization into a performance test
• Network Virtualization product page
• LoadRunner & Performance Center Network Virtualization Help