Greetings!
I have been tasked with transitioning our load testing infrastructure from
physical Windows servers to virtual machines running linux (Redhat
Enterprise Linux 7, to be specific) hosted on VMware. I am looking for
input on how to spec the VMs in terms of number of vCPUs and RAM as well as
number of VMs. Would I be better off with fewer beefy VMs or more VMs of
more modest specification? At present, we have 5 physical servers where
one machine is used as a master/controller and the other four are remote
servers that run the test plans and generate load. Should the master
server be spec'ed differently from the remote servers?
In the end, I need to be able to make a request to the department
responsible for the VMware environment for a number of VMs with general
specifications regarding # of virtual CPU, allocated RAM, and allocated
disk space. The hosts in the VMware farm appear to be running Intel Xeon
E7-4860 v2 (Sandy Bridge) @ 2.6GHz CPUs
Background on how we use JMeter:
I work for a large university, with about 35K students and 10K
faculty/staff, and we are using JMeter to load test our Oracle PeopleSoft
ERP systems (HR, Finance, & Student Administration), when we do major
software or hardware upgrades. We transitioned from HP Loadrunner to JMeter
about 2 years ago with JMeter 3.x. When load testing, our objectives are
to verify that our server/database configurations are sufficient to handle
the anticipated user load for events like student registration, housing
sign-up, or employee annual benefits enrollment, as well as testing for
reasonable response time for particular business processes, like initial
user SSO login to the integrated ERP system, a student registering for
classes, or generating a voucher to pay for something in the financials
system.
Thanks for the help!
-- Scott Dean
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC USA
