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I need to test a network Switch that has QOS capabilities. I need to simulate a large network (preferably up to or exceeding 100 devices), and I need to do it as a live test. My requirements are:

• create around 100, if not more, TCP flows from a test internal network to an external test network.

• The device I am testing will sit between the internal environment and the external environment.

• The device I am testing has quality of service capabilities with which I need to test as if it were in a live environment.

What I have tried:

• used tcpreplay to replay a pcap file through the switch. The problem with this is it only simulates the network traffic, it does not respond to QOS the way normal live connections do.

• I have used iperf as a client and server to send data through the switch, however I am limited by the number of streams that I can create due to the limitations of the hardware/software, combination (I only have 2 servers either side of the switch).

What I would like:

• to simulate a live large network sending TCP traffic from an internal device through the switch (so I can test QOS with up to and over 100 streams at a time) through an external device.

• I would rather not have to populate the test network with a large number of PCs on either side of the switch to simulate the traffic.

Any ideas?

flexavegan
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  • What type of QoS rules are you implementing? Wouldn't it make sense to provide the make/model of switch? – ewwhite Sep 06 '14 at 06:03
  • Isn't it possible to assign multiple IPs on the two servers and run 100 instances of iperf using different interface each time? Have in mind also to have a session like ssh between the servers to check if you have issues with latency during full load that would prevent interactive applications from working properly / as expected – lacasitos Sep 06 '14 at 09:02
  • At this stage it is not relevant to list the QOS rules. The reason being is that I am testing multiple switches, and the problem I am having is with the traffic generation. Thank you for your input. – flexavegan Sep 06 '14 at 17:31
  • Also, it is easy to add multiple IP addresses, on multiple domains to each device. The problem I am having is that iperf can't reliably run more than a handful of instances without running into its own limitations such as one process clobbering the others, and not letting them use processor time to produce traffic. The more I think about it the more I believe I will need to run multiple servers either side. But surely there must be a better way. How do other network administrators test new switches before they put them on a large network? Surely I'm not the only one to have this problem. – flexavegan Sep 06 '14 at 17:32

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