Citrix Connection Test Tool - Part 1

I found this very nice tool to do a stress test into you Citrix XenApp server servers. Also help in doing capacity planning of your Citrix farm.


Introduction
“Citrix Connection Test Tool” provides various connection methods for scalability test and other tests which require a number of sessions to be established. The tool enables testers to establish as many numbers of ICA sessions as they want by creating or duplicating session settings on Presentation Server Client.


What you can do with this test tool 
Using “Citrix Connection Test Tool” helps those who want to run multiple connections test to Citrix Presentation Server. With this tool you can establish the desired amount of ICA sessions from one machine in effective way so that you can measure the scalability on your testing environment.

The tool contains the major three functions and one extra helping tool. The basic purpose of this test tool is to establish multiple connections to Presentation Server in order to test load balancing, logon performance, and so on. These introduced functions in this tool might accomplish various test cases in different ways depending on how you use this tool. Those functions are explained below.


Custom Application Creator (“Custom App.” tab)
You can create the desired amount of Custom ICA Connection for testing on the client machine which runs this tool. Each Custom ICA Connection is newly created with this tool. Each Custom ICA Connection has different account information which has user name with a sequential number at the end of its own (e.g. user0, user1, user2…). You can also run test by launching all the created Custom ICA Connection sequentially in automatic manner.


Customer Application Duplicator (“Cust. App Dup” tab)
You can create the certain amount of Custom ICA Connection by duplicating existing one that is already created in Citrix Presentation Server Client. It is easy to use the existing setting in Client settings. Each duplicated Custom ICA Connection has different account whose user name has sequential number at the end of its own, so each Customer ICA Connection will have different session ID when testing. You can also run test by launching all the duplicated Custom ICA Connection sequentially in automatic manner.


Application Set Test (“App.Set Test” tab)
If you wish to run connection test with some published application on the particular Application Set, you can use “Application Set Test” to do so. You can run connection test by selecting a certain published application in Application Set. This won’t create any new Application Set, but take the information from the selected Application Set to establish the desired amount of ICA sessions to the aimed Citrix Presentation Server Farm.


Account Creator (“Account Create” tab)
Account Creator simplifies your account creation for this test tool. This function creates Domain or Local accounts whose user name have a sequential number at the end of its own name. These accounts should be easily cooperated with the above testing functions. Account Creator is provided by separated binary so that you don’t have to install any runtime environment on Domain Controller or any Servers who owns credentials for testing.


Requirements:
Before using Citrix Connection Test Tool, you need to have runtime environment. You can choose either way of the followings depending on your testing environment allowance.

• Install Visual Basic Runtime (Version 6)
• Register DLL module (TABCTL32.OCX via REGSVR32)

On the next part of this guide is the step by step on how you can use this tool.