nanog mailing list archives

Re: Network traffic simulator


From: Saku Ytti <saku () ytti fi>
Date: Wed, 25 May 2016 23:44:09 +0300

On 25 May 2016 at 23:34, Sabri Berisha <sabri () cluecentral net> wrote:
This depends very much on which Ixia product you're using. In IxExplorer and IxNetwork require a lot of manual labor 
when setting up a test. IxLoad has a little less, but still. It is important to realize that most of the tests can be 
automated using TCL scripts. The company I'm currently with has an entire team doing nothing but test automation 
using Ixia TCL.

I think the problems I pointed out are not fixable by TCL. The
hardware itself simply cannot burst for any reasonable period, it only
paces.

You could create multiple streams and have TCL turn the burst on
occasionally, but how to synchronise this in nanosecond level with the
main stream, and at least in tens of microseconds resolution in
duration? You can't do that, it takes easily 10s to command it to do
something on TCL.

Lot can be done, but for device costing that much, and virtually no
QoS testing can be done, I'm not happy camper. QoS by nature is not
paced. And QoS configuration which looks perfect in IXIA may not work
in real-life. And in my case conversely, real-life problem we had, we
could not replicate in lab with IXIA. I know two other companies who
experienced same, and IXIA SE was unable to solve it.
It is very clear development of software is being dominated by
hardware vendors, not by SPs.

-- 
  ++ytti


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