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.
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
| Tool | Purpose | Status |
|---|---|---|
| VMFleet | Storage load generation via VM fleet running DiskSpd workloads | ✅ Fully Implemented |
| fio | Fine-grained storage I/O benchmarking (Linux VMs) | 🚧 Structure Ready |
| iPerf3 | Network bandwidth and latency testing | 🚧 Structure Ready |
| HammerDB | Database workload benchmarking (OLTP/OLAP) | 🚧 Structure Ready |
| stress-ng | CPU, memory, and system stress testing | 🚧 Structure Ready |
Each tool is standalone — pick one and follow the "Run This Test" instructions on its page. No CI/CD pipeline is required.
- 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
The source code is hosted at https://github.com/AzureLocal/azurelocal-loadtools.
- Prerequisites — Ensure your environment is ready
- Installation — Set up the framework
- Configuration — Configure your cluster and workloads