Hercules: An Environment for Large-Scale Enterprise Infrastructure Testing

Failures in Internet-based services often stem from problems in the underlying enterprise infrastructures that provide the services. We propose an environment called Hercules to test the reliability and performance of large-scale enterprise infrastructures. Hercules contains two major components: (1) a methodology to build a virtual testbed that can accurately emulate any infrastructure topology, as well as simulate failures, attacks and other types of stresses on the infrastructure to identify defects and bottlenecks; and (2) a realistic traffic model and a tool to automatically generate different traffic loads based on the model. Systems testers can use Hercules to evaluate whether an existing or proposed enterprise infrastructure provides adequate support to its targeted applications.