Testing Pre-Production Servers Accurately?

An anonymous reader asks: "Having been granted a 90-day demo enclosure of new blade servers from a major vendor the question I find myself asking is: On a limited budget, how does one simulate 1000+ attached clients and the activity of those clients? We're a K-12 school district and our current servers don't keep up with all the roaming-profile abuse from our Windows workstations. Are there tools or tricks available to simulate load on Netware/Linux servers? The user groups around here usually answer this question with 'Get some workstations for a test lab!', there's got to be a less expensive option, right? Can we leverage our existing client populous to achieve our goal, without interrupting or changing the quality of service at the desktop, substantially?"

Comments

Linux? 1000 users?

[mnmn]

Come on.

You buy blades to serve 1000 users on Linux?

For most purposes like openldap logins, simple database queries, pam logins, mail serving, simple firewall etc, you can get away with a simple Athlon64 server for upto 10,000 users. Remote profiles in windows is REAAALY heavy, think of the delay when youre logging in on someone else's workstation... Linux's authentication isnt that heavy at all.

Just get an xSeries 206 ($500) and be done with it.