Specifications

A Principled Technologies test report 45
Dell Active System 800 converged infrastructure solution: User
collaboration performance
We used Visual Studio 2010 to execute the test workload, generating a realistic user workload where each of the
simulated users performed a task approximately every minute. The load test was 60 minutes long, consisting of a 15-
minute warm-up time, 30-minute measurement window.
While the test was running, we recorded CPU utilization and total requests per second on our SharePoint server
using Windows Performance Monitor. We also recorded latency using the Web Page Response Time counter in Visual
Studio load test parameters.
About running the Lync Server test
We ran a load test composed of three commonly used tasks that Lync provides: IM messaging, Audio/Video
conferencing, and Address Book Search functionality. We ran 1,000 users, with 960 users dedicated to instant
messaging, 30 users dedicated to Audio/Video conferencing, and 10 users dedicated to searching. This was the default
user allocation by the Lync Server Stress And Performance Tool generator. We ran the test for 60 minutes and calculated
the total number of actions completed for each task using the 30 minute block of time coinciding with the other tests.
We used Windows Performance Monitor to record results using the Lync counters provided by the testing software.
Where appropriate, we divided the number of tasks by the 1,800 second run time to get a task/second score.
About running the DVD Store tests
We created a series of batch files, SQL scripts, and shell scripts to automate the complete test cycle. DVD Store
outputs an orders-per-minute metric, which is a running average calculated through the test. In this report, we report
the last OPM reported by each client/target pair.
Each complete test cycle consisted of the general steps listed below.
1. Clean up prior outputs from the host system and all client driver systems.
2. Drop all databases from all target VMs.
3. Restore all databases on all target VMs.
4. Shut down all VMs.
5. Reboot the host system and all client systems.
6. Wait for a ping response from the server under test (the hypervisor system), all client systems, and all VMs.
7. Let the test server idle for 20 minutes.
8. Start the DVD Store driver on all respective clients.
We used the following DVD Store parameters for testing the virtual machines in this study:
ds2sqlserverdriver.exe --target=<target_IP> --ramp_rate=10 --run_time=30 --
n_threads=36 --db_size=40GB --think_time=0.005 --detailed_view=Y --
warmup_time=15