Why IT Testers Love X-Ray
Why IT Testers Love X-Ray
Real-world Scenarios
Assess HCI configurations against all the common infrastructure scenarios and use cases such as private cloud, databases and end-user-computing.
Detailed Reporting
View, analyze and compare the results from real-world HCI scenario tests to establish the best solution fit for your organization.
Broad HCI Support
Establish infrastructure suitability with the assessment of a complete range of current HCI vendors, hypervisors and hardware platforms.
Capabilities & Benefits
Fully Customizable Test Scenarios
With a suite of fully customizable test scenarios, organizations can evaluate HCI performance and resilience when placed under real-world stress and failure scenarios.
Extensive customization via X-Ray’s user-interface allows for easy test adaptation to meet the specific needs of your test scenarios.
Benchmarking As Code
X-Ray’s framework was architected to provide consistent and repeatable testing of different HCI platforms. Test scenarios are published as .yaml files which describe the test process and workload parameters, rather than detail the specific low-level actions required to perform them.
All built-in test scenario .yaml files are published on a GitLab code repository here, enabling IT administrators to easily view and modify them. It is also possible to create and share your own test scenarios particular to specific infrastructure needs.
Test Scenario Capabilities
The built-in test scenarios enable HCI platform lifecycle assessments to be made from day-0 though day-N.
Application Performance Testing
Simulate a hyperconverged infrastructure’s effectiveness in managing multiple VDI VMs or OLTP database VMs generating load at a fixed intensity.
The expectation is that IOPS should reach and maintain a steady-state, with I/O latency remaining consistently low. More performance consistency indicates better VDI user or OLTP database experience.
Default test scenarios include:
- OLTP Simulator
- VDI Simulator
Infrastructure Resiliency
Application downtime and data loss can have a costly impact on organizations. These scenario tests measure VM IOPS and latency to determine the impact of a variety of infrastructure situations, including node failures and intentional node reboots during upgrades.
If nodes fail, the applications are restarted on other hosts and should continue with the same performance they achieved prior to the failure. Similarly, this also applies to applications moved to other nodes during upgrade scenarios.
Consistently high IOPS and low latency indicates better application performance.
Default test scenarios include:
- Extended Node Failure
- Rolling Upgrade
- Sequential Node Failure
- Total Power Loss
- Unplanned Site Failover
- VM High Availability
How It Works
Nutanix X-Ray performs tests that intentionally create infrastructure load or node-failure situations to replicate real-world activity within the datacenter. This includes loading cluster nodes with many VMs, shutting down nodes to simulate failures and creating high levels of storage utilization to simulate high workload utilization scenarios. As a result, X-Ray requires a dedicated test cluster.
It is recommended to deploy the X-Ray VM to independent hardware from the test cluster, enabling the full range of tests, such as cluster node failure and upgrade scenarios.
To get started:
Test Transparency
X-Ray includes a wide array of test scenarios by default and new ones can be created and modified enabling a solution test that most accurately reflects your IT objectives.
Curie is a code component of X-Ray used to interpret and execute all test scenarios. This has been made open source GitLab under the MIT license, and allows everyone to see exactly how X-Ray test scenarios are executed for authenticity.
See more about how each scenario functions by visiting the scenario code repository here.
Resources
Nutanix X-Ray Datasheet
Learn how Nutanix X-Ray simplifies the process of testing different combinations of HCI, hypervisor and hardware platforms to help you establish the best performing and the most resilient configuration for your workload needs.
Join The Conversation
Join the community conversation to hear from peers on X-Ray tips, tricks and and their experiences on testing different aspects of the HCI infrastructure lifecycle.
Frequently Asked Questions
Get answers to the most commonly asked questions about Nutanix X-Ray.
Storage Performance Uncovered at .NEXT 2020
Gary Little, Performance Engineering Director discusses the Nutanix platform performance throughput you should expect and how to test performance for yourselves.
