Application Performance Engineering Blog – Shunra Software

First of all, many thanks to Joerg Nalik Ph.D., Director for Infrastructure Technologies, SAP LABs and Mark Tomlinson, Senior Product Manager, HP Software for their invaluable help on this project.  They are visionaries, thought leaders and a true pleasure to work with.

My previous post about LoadRunner in the Cloud spoke about how Shunra™ for HP Software not only works well in clouds, but actually “completes the picture” for anyone conducting performance testing of applications that will be accessed remotely.    I am not alone with these statements.  SAP Labs, HP and Shunra are pleased to announce the availability of a new whitepaper, released today, June 7,  titled, “Application Performance Testing in a Virtual Environment.”

In this paper, we explain a best practice for performance testing SAP applications.  This best practice was conceived by SAP LABs and goes through four stages that take an SAP application from the initial steps of verifying functionality and accessibility, to how to tune the solution with WAN acceleration technology.  While the paper specifically focused on SAP applications, it’s clear that this best practice applies to almost any application that will be accessed remotely.

One of the key themes in the paper is virtualization.  As I have mentioned before, Shunra for HP Software already works well in clouds.  This paper took a scientific approach and compared tests using dedicated, physical machines with a completely virtual setup.  Specifically, HP LoadRunner was first run on a standalone machine, through a Shunra Appliance and then to the SAP application servers.  For comparison, HP LoadRunner with Shunra for HP was installed on virtual machines (controller plus load generators) and the SAP application servers were also installed on virtual machines.

When the six-hour load tests were run and the results were compared, the average transaction response time varied by only a few one thousandths of a second – well below any reasonable requirement for accuracy!

Whether you’re interested in using HP’s new LoadRunner in the Cloud offering, or simply trying to reap some of the many benefits of virtualization by moving your testing environment into a virtual server, this paper is a must read.