Vulcan Layer 4-7 Gig-E Testing

VulcanBay chassis model is a scalable Gigabit Ethernet Layer 4-7 Traffic Generator and Analyzer offers extreme performance for stateful traffic load testing, analysis and characterizing of Ethernet equipment and network infrastructure. It supports 1/2.5/5/10/25/40GE L4-7 interfaces and can be used for simulating millions of real-world end-user environments to test and validate infrastructure, a single device, or an entire system.

VulcanBay chassis model offers stateful end-to-end testing of network appliances such as switches, firewalls, routers, NAT routers, proxies, bandwidth shapers, and more. The platform is also suitable to characterize entire network infrastructure performance.

Developers of Ethernet-based network appliances can characterize their performance by measuring connection establishment and teardown rates, packet forwarding rate at large numbers of connections and identify performance bottlenecks. The platform is also ideal for rapid validation of performance or regression testing.

Developers of stateful network security devices such as next-generation firewalls (NGFW) can measure TLS handshake rate, TLS throughput, TCP CC/CPS, and HTTP CPS/TPS. Users can also replay their own PCAP files to the DUT for performance verification.

VulcanManager is included for ad-hoc test execution and remote management of test equipment located in multiple locations. VulcanAppMix helps to test with real-world applications and protocols for highly scalable application emulation.

Flexible upgrade path

VulcanBay chassis models can be easily upgraded for greater performance thanks to Xena’s flexible licensing model which lets you easily upgrade XenaScale by simply updating your license. This helps you protect your investment by spreading out capital expenditure across multiple quarters, and optimize your budget by purchasing additional performance when required.

Performance:
•    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

Physical Specifications
•    6 slots
•    3.5” (H) x 19” (W) x 17.6” (D) (9 x 43.7 x 44cm)
•    50 lbs (22.7 kg) with no test modules installed

Power
•    AC Voltage: 100-240V
•    Frequency: 50-60Hz
•    Power Consumption: 238W (idle) / 329W (running)
•    Max. Current: 0.8A with 120V supply, and 0.4A with 240V supply

VulcanBay chassis model Product Numbers:

XS240-12x10G
• 12 x 10 GigE SR/LR/DAC (or 1000M optical/copper)

XS240-4x10G-2x40G
• 2 x 40 GigE SR/LR/DAC and
• 4 x 10 GigE SR/LR/DAC

XS280-4x10G-4x25G
• 4 x 25 GigE SR/LR/DAC and
• 2 x 1/10 GigE SR/LR/DAC

PORT & SPEED LICENSES
• XS-10G-2S License – enables 1 x 2-speed L4-7 Test Port, 1GE/10GE
• XS-10G-4S License – enables 1 x 4-speed L4-7 Test Port, 1GE/2.5GE/5GE/10GE
• XS-40G-1S License – enables 1 x 1-speed L4-7 Test Port, 40GE
• XS-25G-3S License – enables 1 x 3-speed L4-7 Test Port, 1GE/10GE/25GE

PACKET ENGINE LICENSES
• XS-PE License – enables 1 Packet Engine on XenaScale chassis: 1M cc, and 0.3M cps@1M cc

VulcanBay chassis models:

XenaConnect

Core Functions

XenaConnect is a free Windows-based application for managing Vulcan extreme-performance L4-7 test platforms. It is used for stateful end-to-end testing of network devices such as firewalls, SSL/TLS proxies, switches, routers, NAT routers, load-balancers, bandwidth shapers, and more.

XenaConnect is suitable for characterizing network baseline performance for TCP. This is done by measuring connection establishment and tear down rates, number of concurrent connections/transactions, packet forwarding rate at large numbers of connections and identify performance bottlenecks.

With Xena’s TLS 1.2 support, users can do TLS performance testing e.g. handshakes per second, TLS throughput, concurrent TLS connections, etc., with different cipher suites and certificate key sizes on a DUT that decrypts traffic on one side and encrypts on the other.

With XenaAppMix, the platform allows users to run realistic application traffic mixes for performance verification of content-aware networks and application-aware network devices. This is extremely useful when verifying the performance of network security devices with application-awareness, such as next-generation firewalls, IPS, etc., in both network pre-production and post-production phases of enterprises. XenaConnect also allow users to replay their own captured traffic and scale up to millions of connections.

XenaConnect supports ad-hoc test execution and remote management of test equipment located in multiple locations. Xena also offers an open scripting API (XenaScripting) for automated testing

Xena’s L4-7 Test Platform offers stateful end-to-end testing of network appliances such as switches, firewalls, routers, NAT routers, proxies, load-balancers, bandwidth shapers, and more. The platform is also suitable to characterize entire network infrastructure performance for TCP.

Developers of Ethernet-based network appliances can measure connection establishment and teardown rates, packet forwarding rate at large numbers of connections and identify performance bottlenecks. The platform is also ideal for rapid validation of performance or regression testing.

Developers of TCP-based application servers such as web- and FTP servers can measure TCP connection rates and verify robustness against TCP SYN attacks. HTTP get blasting can be used to verify web server performance and robustness.

A MS Windows desktop application (XenaConnect) is included for ad-hoc test execution and remote management of test equipment located in multiple locations. Xena also offers an open scripting API (XenaScripting) for automating testing from any scripting environment.

The Xena L4-7 stateful TCP Test Platform provides a wide range of copper and optical interfaces ranging from 1 Gigabit to 40 Gigabit Ethernet in various port densities.

Chassis/Models/Interfaces

The Xena L4-7 platform is available in two models designed to suit different performance requirements:

• XenaAppliance [4 Packet Engines]

A small portable chassis that can hold one Layer 4-7 network interface card and one Layer 2-3 test module (optional).

• XenaScale [24 Packet Engines]

A 19” rack mountable chassis with up to six Layer 4-7 network interface cards.

The Packet Engines in each chassis can be flexibly assigned to one or more ports. While default behavior is for each port to use 1/N’th of the available PE’s, multiple PE’s can be allocated to a single port for maximum performance for a given application.
Both Xena L4-7 chassis are fast, reliable and rugged, based on Linux and equipped with solid state hard drives for speed and robustness.

Software

The Xena L4-7 platform comes complete with XenaConnect, a software application with an intuitive user-interface that makes it easy to install, connect and simulate high volumes of realistic TCP traffic, and then analyze and document the results.

API scripting from any tool environment

XenaScripting is a free text-based Command Line Interface (CLI) API that makes test automation easy to script from any scripting environment that supports TCP/IP. (Available from Xena’s website).

Test Applications

The Xena L4-7 platform is scalable and can be used to quickly and easily generate millions of TCP flows with specified load profiles and configurable IP/TCP/Payload parameters. Real time stats and test reports provides an overview of the system or device characteristics.

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

Connection-oriented traffic generation

TCP connections can be customized by applying modifications to 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 by the user via a graphical payload editor. Payloads can also be loaded from file.

Wire-speed software packet processing

Xena’s L4-7 solutions use the latest 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.

Lab-based Performance Testing

The Xena L4-7 test platform is well suited for validating network device performance in development and production environments. The high port density means large port-count test beds can now be set up at a fraction of the cost of existing test solutions. Test topologies range from L2 forwarding such as firewalls and switches, over packet routing and load balancing, 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 for this kind of testing are maximum number of concurrent TCP connections, maximum connection establishment rates and packet forwarding rates at various TCP segment sizes.

Network Infrastructure Test

The platform provides capacity and performance testing for service providers and large enterprise networks.

In this segment of testing, the focus is less on the individual forwarding devices and servers and more on the 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 several traffic generators.

Portable Testing Solution

XenaAppliance is a portable test solution that can be brought to the edges of the transport network for validation of network performance. Examples are the DSLAM/Central Offices for wired access technologies such as ADSL or data plane gateways for wireless networks such as UMTS or 4G.

XenaWeb is a standalone “mini” server that gives easy access to Xena’s suite of applications from any HTML-5 compatible browser or device.

This lets you quickly access all of Xena’s test applications from Linux, Mac, and Windows operating environments using devices ranging from desktop PCs to tablets and smart phones – all without installing any new software. This is a valuable feature for test engineers operating in environments where security regulations prohibit installing new software on the computing devices provided.

XenaWeb hosts a Windows Server 2012 R2 allowing up to 5 users to simultaneously access Xena’s growing range of test software including XenaManager-2G, XenaIntegrator, Xena 1564, Xena 2544, Xena2889, and Xena3918.

Using the handheld-size ‘Next Unit of Computing’ (NUC) form factor, XenaWeb offers a huge access flexibility with a very low physical and power usage footprint. Everything is pre-installed and ready to run – simply configure the IP address, open a browser and start testing.

XenaWeb System Diagram

XenaWeb makes it easy for up to 5 concurrent users to run tests and manage their Xena equipment via ordinary web browsers on laptops, tablets or even smartphones.