Since I write about performance testing I should give you some idea on how we do performance tests on the dev department.

We run all our load testing using Visual Studio Team System 2008:

• Visual Studio Team System Load Agent. Applies the load to the servers. 
• Visual Studio Team System Load Controller. Collects performance counters etc.
• Visual Studio Team Suite/Test Edition. Used by the tester to run the tests.

The server hardware we use are 3 HP-servers with 8 cores each and RAM ranging from 4 to 16 GB:

DEVLAB1: HP DL360 G5, 4GB RAM, 2 x Quad Core 2 GHz, 3 x 146GB HD RAID 5
DEVLAB2: HP DL360 G5, 8GB RAM, 2 x Quad Core 2 GHz, 3 x 146GB HD RAID 5
DEVLAB3: HP DL360 G5, 16GB RAM, 2 x Quad Core 2 GHz, 3 x 146GB HD RAID 5

And then we use workstations for the load testing machines:

DEVAGENT1/2: Dell OPTIPLEX 755, 2.4 GHz Quad Core, 4GB RAM,150GB HD
CONTROLLER: Dell OPTIPLEX 620, Dual Core, 4GB RAM

A few notes on the hardware, it was critical to have a) gigabit network and b) quad core agents or we could not overload these servers for some scenarios like output caching. We run Windows Server 2003 as operating system on the agents and Windows Vista on the controller. We also use the controller as a Ghost server, we use Ghost Solution Suite 2 to be able to quickly restore servers to different operating systems. Some of the images we can deploy are:

• Windows 2003 x64 Standard
• Windows 2003 x64 with IIS, .NET 3.5
• Windows 2003 x64 with SQL2005
• Windows 2003 x86 Standard
• Windows 2003 x86 with IIS
• Windows 2003 x86 .NET 3.5, IIS
• Windows 2003 x86 with SQL2005
• Windows 2008 x64
• Windows 2008 x64 with IIS, .NET 3.5
• Windows 2008 x64 with SQL2008
• Windows 2008 x86
• Windows 2008 x86 with IIS,.NET 3.5
• Windows 2008 x86 with SQL2008

It takes about 10 minutes to restore one server with a new operating system. To be able to access BIOS or servers that has gone crazy we use Integrated Lights-Out Advanced for remote access, otherwise just Remote Desktop if the server is up and running. The reason we did not chose VM-Ware was that we wanted to do performance testing on bare metal, we may look into that option again going forward because it enables us to start up different configurations much faster. Hyper-V would be another option.

This is a quick layout of our machines: