[c-nsp] Re: Packet Generator

[Thomas Kernen]

> On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 10:09:41 +0100, Thomas Kernen <thomas at ip-man.net> 
> wrote:
>>
>> Ixia fan here, great hardware and software but way too expensive,
>> sometimes the hardware does show up on ebay & co and some good prices
>> but 15K won't buy you a chassis and cards :-(
>>
>> Thomas
>
> I apologize in advance for the naive question, but what exactly are
> these Ixia and Spirent boxes doing that justify five figure price
> tags?
>
> regards,
> aaron.glenn

In our case we use it to test thoughtput up to 10Gbps (aka, does vendor 
marketing actually apply in the real world with our IOS release, ACLs, 
hardware, etc...) with all possible packet sizes. BGP/OSPF load testing 
(inject remove routes while breaking other stuff in the network), we 
also have an SDK which allows us to build virtual machines per Ethernet 
port (each one has it's own CPU) and test other components (SMTP load on 
mail gateways for ex). For us the sky is the limit, I do quite some work 
on multicast data flows and testing non RFC compliant packets to see the 
impact on our infrastructure.

I know that Ixia has software for VPN/Http/SSL stress testing, but my 
work is L2/L3 mostly so I focus on the dat paths and flows. Personally I 
like the gear, have access to quite a few scripts from 3rd parties that 
are used for regressive testing of software releases so for us it's a 
great way of validating an IOS release prior to deploying it in the 
network by checking that features we use are not broken in that release 
(= counters, subinterfaces, memory leaks, ....)

Thomas