7/31/2019 Mercury LoadRunner and Citrix

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Mercury Interactive (Mercury) is the leading provider of enterprise testing and performance

management. Citrix and Mercury have teamed to jointly develop the first native performance testing

and monitoring solution for Citrix-deployed applications.

Mercurys industry standard load testing product LoadRunner, and application performance

management product Topaz, have both been customized to supportCitrix environments. This means

that customers can now accurately test and monitor their Citrix-based systems before and after

deployment to ensure high performance, scalability and availability.

LoadRunner for Citrix Solution

LoadRunner works by emulating hundreds or thousands of ICA clients with just a handful of

machines to create a scalable MetaFrame XP load testing solution. Up to 100 connections can be

made from a single workstation (dependent on machine hardware) using the LoadRunner

for Citrix integration. Sessions are initiated and workflow scripts are executed on client machines;

simulating real life scenarios and generating realistic network and resource loads. Since scripts

controlling user sessions are executed on the client machines, no additional overhead is placed on

the MetaFrame XP servers eliminating the potential inaccuracies that are inherent when testing with

the CTSK.

The virtual users are created using a recording technology that captures the ICA traffic between the

client and server into a high level, easy to read, maintainable test script. These scripts can be easily

modified to represent real users with their own sets of data and replay speeds. By licensing

key Citrix technology, LoadRunners virtual users generate exactly the same traffic as the ICA client

and fool the system into believing it is under the load of real production users.

By measuring the end-to-end response time of user transactions, LoadRunner helps identify

performance problems from the end users perspective. Using a suite of real-time performance

monitors that measure the system performance across all the tiers, LoadRunner can also help isolate

these problems wherever they lie in the system. Finally, all the test scripts created in pre-deployment

load testing with LoadRunner can be reused as-is in Topaz for performance monitoring once the

application goes live.

As with all testing strategies, tests are only as accurate at the workflows utilized to emulate real life

scenarios. For example, scripts that emulate users running a word processing program for typing and

saving of files may not produce accurate results if printing is usually performed but not incorporated

into the scripts workflow. Thus, when developing virtual user scripts, it is important that the scripts

replicate the actions of real users to obtain accurate results.

Client machines running LoadRunner virtual users can emulate real users accessingthe Citrix MetaFrame XP farm and backend resources. All scripts are run from the client machines,

eliminating any server side overhead producing realistic measurements. A LoadRunner Controller is

used to administer the test and aggregate performance measurements.