When deploying NSX Advanced Load Balancer, it's handy to have a pre-configured web server. In the download portal where you download NSX ALB, there's a perf-server.ova you can use.

This is an old Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS, but it has a webserver and a whole bunch of options to get different types of data.

Deploying the OVA is straight forward. It's set to use DHCP, but if you need to set a static IP, follow on.

Set a static IP

Log on to the console:

username: aviuser
password: aviuser

Edit /etc/network/interfaces.

1$ sudo vim /etc/network/interfaces
2[sudo] password for aviuser:

Change to the following:

1auto eth0
2iface eth0 inet static
3address 172.30.14.120
4netmask 255.255.255.0
5gateway 172.30.14.1
6dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8 9.9.9.9

Reset the network interface

1$ sudo ifdown eth0
2$ sudo ifup eth0

Check the config:

1$ ip a

Web server pages

If you look at the notes on the ova when it's deployed into vCenter, it lists what pages you can request to test the webserver.

 1files by size for perf test:
 2100b.txt
 3100kb.txt
 410mb.txt
 5128b.txt
 6128kb.txt
 71b.txt
 81kb.txt
 91mb.txt
10200kb.txt
112mb.txt
12500kb.txt
135mb.txt
14
15New Avi web page
16index.htm or /
17
18HTTP POST form page
19form_post.html
20
21Web page showing server's IP addresses
22server.php
23
24Health Monitor page with 'SUCCESS' in html head and body
25health.html
26
27ab, ab-mr, curl, siege, wrk for generating traffic
28
29Openssl updated to 1.0.1f-1ubuntu2.22

Performance testing - ApacheBench

Apart from perv-server.ova being a webserver, it can also be used to generate web traffic.

1aviuser@nginx-1:~$ ab -n 100 -c 10 https://yourwebserver.org/

This will send 100 requests, doing 10 at a time.

There's a lot to explore. Let me know what you find useful.

TinyVM

As an alternative web server for testing, check out TinyVM from Luis Chanu: https://github.com/luischanu/TinyVM.