VATS: Virtualized-Aware Automated Test Service

It is anticipated that by 2015 more than 75% of Information Technology infrastructure will be purchased as a service from service providers. Services will be hosted in virtualized shared resource pools referred to as Clouds. Service providers will need to ensure that customer performance requirements are satisfied while consuming an acceptable quantity of resources. This paper describes a Virtualization-aware Automated Testing Service (VATS). VATS is a framework for automated test execution in Cloud computing environments. It executes tests, manipulates virtualized infrastructure, and collects performance information. VATS uses HP LoadRunner as a load generator and provides the foundation for an automatic performance evaluator for Cloud environments. A case study describes our use of VATS with an SAP R/3 system running in a Xen-based virtualized resource pool. The results from VATS are used to determine the impact of virtual machine configuration parameters on a SAP system.