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Introduction

Category: Getting Started

The Azure Local Load Testing Framework is a comprehensive, automated solution for load testing Azure Local (Azure Stack HCI) clusters. It validates storage, network, and compute performance before production or development workloads are migrated or deployed.

Why Load Test Azure Local?

Azure Local clusters represent significant infrastructure investments. Before committing production workloads, organizations need confidence that:

  • Storage performance meets application IOPS, throughput, and latency requirements
  • Network throughput supports east-west traffic, RDMA/SMB Direct expectations
  • Compute capacity handles expected virtual machine density
  • The cluster operates stably under sustained load without thermal throttling or hardware degradation

Supported Load Testing Tools

Tool Purpose Status
VMFleet Storage load generation via VM fleet running DiskSpd workloads ✅ Fully Implemented
fio Fine-grained storage I/O benchmarking (Linux VMs) ✅ Implemented
iPerf3 Network bandwidth and latency testing ✅ Implemented
HammerDB Database workload benchmarking (OLTP/OLAP) ✅ Implemented
stress-ng CPU, memory, and system stress testing ✅ Implemented

Key Features

  • 100% Automated — End-to-end pipeline from cluster validation to report generation
  • Configuration-Driven — Master environment file with tagged variables; nothing hardcoded
  • Credential Security — Azure Key Vault integration or interactive credential prompting
  • Comprehensive Monitoring — Real-time storage, network, and compute metric collection
  • Multi-Format Reports — PDF, Word (DOCX), and Excel (XLSX) output
  • CI/CD Ready — GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, and GitLab CI pipeline definitions
  • Modular Architecture — Add new testing tools without modifying existing automation

Project Repository

The source code is hosted at https://github.com/AzureLocal/azurelocal-loadtools.

Next Steps