By A-Joseph Dupre and Sam Alsous, Keysight
Keysight contributed a new example use case Ixia-c traffic engine deployment on Amazon Web Services with DPDK to the OTG examples repository under the Open Traffic Generator project. This laboratory is a software only scenario that can run entirely within the AWS CloudShell utility as a means to deploy a representative EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instance-to-instance network traffic scenario within a VPC (Virtual Private Cloud).
The lab in the diagram below, can accelerate the heavy lifting of deploying all of the necessary resources to execute a traffic test by automating all resource creation using the industry standard multi-cloud IaC (Infrastructure as Code) tool, Terraform. This scenario assists the user in executing a throughput data plane test based on the RFC 2544 between the two EC2 instances that showcases the ease of use and flexibility of the Ixia-C elastic network generator in verifying network traffic SLAs (Service Level Agreements) for services deployed in the cloud.
Moreover, with support for DPDK (Data Plan Development Kit) on AWS instance types, the Ixia-C test tool is capable not only of functional testing but can elastically scale within the public cloud to provide considerable network performance for testing the next generation of highly available network solutions being offered today and in the future on top of cloud. In addition to generating high-performance network traffic, you must be able to deploy a cloud-based solution in a variety of scenarios on a myriad of underlying networking technologies. The container-based nature of Ixia-C allows deployment of traffic source and destination test agents throughout the network to test end-to-end scenarios within a cloud, across multi-cloud and hybrid networks.
The Lab uses the Community Edition of Keysight’s Elastic Network Generator and provides a great way to start using Ixia-c with limited scale of traffic ports and protocol sessions at no cost.
The test results show a maximum of 10Gig of throughput, but a much higher throughput of 100, 200 Gbps and more can be achieved with horizontal scaling ( more test ports).
Keysight encourages you to take the new AWS-based lab for a test drive and see how the OTG open standard for testing Layer 2-7 network devices and applications can help you deliver the next generation of network services.