VMware with Rational Performance Tester
Rational testing products run on VMware images, such as VMware ESX Server or VMware Server.
The partitioning of hardware into multiple virtual servers can have a dramatic affect on performance. IBM Rational can make no guarantees with respect to performance or scalability in a virtualized environment
If IBM suspects that a problem is the result of the virtualization technology they will require the problem be recreated in a native environment before providing continued defect support.
There are two kinds of vmware solutions...
ESX server minimal tier between hardware and virtual operation systems. Adds some overhead. Workstation Virtual OS runs on the top of another OS. This might not be a good choice as overheads are high and impossible to quantify.
Transfer images
Use VMWare Converter Standalone to send VMs from one environment to the other.
- VCenter/ESXi
- Workstation/Player/Fusion
- Third-party virtual machine
- HyperV server
You can also convert the your the underlying OS from your computer into a VM.
Caveats
Some people have reported issues running RPT with VMware.:
Our conclusion is big no for testing performance on vmware, unless you're planning to run production on vmware...We detected seriously high peaks in response times, and the application could not serve as many users and as many transactions as we were expecting and calculating it would...Running the same test on a physical server...showed that the system was performing ok. We made some capacity measures and found out that the vmware server was performing worse than an old basic level laptop.