Introduction to the New HPE LoadRunner Virtual Table Server (VTS) – Part 1

A Step by Step guide to using the New HPE Virtual Table Server (VTS)

For those of you who have been using LoadRunner for a while, you may have heard about the Virtual Table Server (VTS). This is a technology has been around since the early versions of LoadRunner. However, the original version of the tool was never officially supported by HPE. There was little documentation available for it and what was available just seemed too complicated. Hence, I rarely used that tool back then. Over the years I tried to find alternate ways to handle data within my scripts and tests which helped me meet my testing goals. With version 11.52, HP released a new and improved version of it, which now officially supported by HPE. I decided to look into it and try it out. However, I could not find any simple step by step documentation anywhere. After looking through different sources of information, I finally figured out how to set it up and use it effectively. I have now used it on several of my recent engagements and I can say that the VTS has saved me significant time in managing complex performance tests and helped simplify my test scenarios.

In the next few blog posts I would like to share a simple step by step process on how to set it up and use it.

But before I show you on how to use it, let’s take a minute to understand what the Virtual Table Server (VTS) is and when one should consider using it.

During performance testing of complex applications, you may often run into situations where you need to run scripts that need to share data. For example, let’s look at the typical procurement path in an Oracle or SAP ERP environment, where you need to create a Purchase Request (PR), which then feeds into a Purchase Order (PO) – which then you have to receive against.  If you are designing a test scenario, one of the ways you can handle this is by seeding the data prior to your actual test. i.e. create a large number of PR to POs in the database prior to the actual test run, which then get used during the test by the various scripts.  Another solution is that you could put all these processes together in one long script so that various steps pass data to the next step. Both of these options will work. But they are very time tedious and could add additional level of complexity to your scripts and scenario design.

The VTS technology will help you to accomplish this data sharing across Vusers in real-time thus eliminating the need to seed data prior to the test or add unnecessary complexity to your scripts to manage data. The VTS tool provides a shared data table that can be accessed by multiple concurrent users during run time to read or write data.

So, referring back to our procurement path example – you can send the PR number (write) to the VTS data table, the PO script can read those PR numbers from that shared data table and create a PO number which can again be written to the same shared data table.  Finally, those PO numbers can be retrieved by the 3^rd receiving script to finish the Procurement workflow. All this happening in real-time during the actual scenario execution without a data file in sight!

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