Configuring IP aliases for a remote Windows location

To make it appear that a virtual user has its own IP address during a schedule run, configure IP aliases for each Windows remote location.

Procedure

  1. Click Start > Settings > Control Panel > Network Connection.
  2. Open the network interface that you want to associate the IP aliases with. In most cases this is the Local Area Connection. Click Properties.
  3. Scroll down to Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4), and click Properties.
  4. You must be using static IP addresses to create IP aliases on this host. Therefore, confirm that Use the following IP address is selected, and then click Advanced.
  5. Create the IP aliases:
    1. Click Add in the IP Addresses area of the IP Settings page to specify the IP address of the new alias. Make sure that the address is valid for the network and is not being used by another host.
    2. Enter the IP address and the subnet mask of the new alias.
  6. After you create the alias, click OK in each previous dialog to complete the configuration.
  7. Set the schedule so that the virtual users will use IP aliases during a run; for information, see Enabling virtual users to use IP aliases.

Results

When you run the schedule, it will give the impression that the network traffic is being generated from multiple hosts.

What to do next

You can insert custom code into your test to retrieve the runtime IP addresses of each virtual user. For information, see Retrieving the IP address of a virtual user.
Note: To add multiple IP aliases, use the netsh command, as shown in the following example:
netsh -c Interface ip add address name="Gig Ethernet" addr=10.10.0.21 mask=255.255.0.0
The ntcmds.chm file, typically located in C:\WINDOWS\Help, contains more details about the netsh command. When you are finished with the IP aliases, use the following command to remove them:
netsh -c Interface ip delete address name="Gig Ethernet" addr=10.10.0.21 
You can also use a batch file to add and delete the aliases.