OCS Simulation Testing Tool

I recently took a look at the “Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Capacity Planning Tool”.  I was looking forward to taking a look at OCSStress.exe which is an OCS workload and user activity simulation tool (included as part of the capacity planning tool). Those with Microsoft Exchange backgrounds will remember it’s close cousins – LoadGenerator and LoadSim.

You can use it for simulating user activities, benchmarking, pre-deployment validation, and to see the affects of different UC workloads in a lab or pre-production environment.

This OCS Stress Simulator tool is capable of simulating the following user activities:

• SIP Sign-in
• Get presence
• Send/receive instant messages
• Create IM conferences and send messages in conferences
• Address book download and address book query
• Distribution list expansion
• PSTN Gateway loads
• VoIP traffic (calls to Mediation Server, Audio/Video MCU, Edge Server, Response Group Service, and Conference Auto Attendant when these scenarios are enabled.)

Noteworthy pre-requisite, installation, and usage notes:

• OCSStress.exe cannot run on a computer that is also running Office Communications Server 2007 R2.  It is installed on a client machine that will simulate the OCS traffic. You also install it on the back-end database server for each pool.
• It needs to be installed and run on the back-end database server (enterprise pool or standard edition). This creates the user accounts.
• Is only available in 64-bit and runs on Windows 2003 and Windows 2008.
• You must run it under a user who is part of the DomainAdmins group.
• The Exchange Server 2007 ForestProp needs to be run. This creates the test distribution lists, and integration with Exchange UM.
• The first time a test is run the test users logon for the first time and there is additional initialization operations that occurs on the backend.  It is recommended that you run a short test first, and then start benchmarking.
• The results are reported in performance counters that are installed on the client when OCSStress is installed.

The OCS 2007 R2 Capacity Planning Tool (which includes OCSstress) can be downloaded here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f8cbddd6-7608-4bbe-9246-16e96c62bef4&displaylang=en. In July 2009 there were some hotifx updates to this tool which corrected some problems.  Those fixes are udpated in the download above.

The LCS 2005 equivalent can be downloaded here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=107a5e83-ca59-4bcb-a3bc-27efd97a477d&displaylang=en.

The document “Running Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 in a Virtualized Topology” has additional good information on configuring and using this tool.

I have only used the tool for basic sign-in and IM, but I’ll update this post with my experiences as I used it more.  I am also interested in people’s experience with it.