DTM Controller and Client Organization

Note  This content applies to the Windows Logo Kit (WLK). For the latest information using the new Windows Hardware Certification Kit (HCK), see Windows HCK User's Guide on the Windows Hardware Dev Center.

Before you install the DTM software in your lab, you should decide how you want to organize your lab's resources to best use DTM. Determine the number of controllers, the number of clients connecting to those controllers, and on which computer(s) to install DTM Studio. These decisions are partly influenced by the type of devices and/or systems that you want a logo for.

For example, to test specific devices, such as a USB-based flash-card reader, you might decide to allocate fewer controllers, each with more clients, because multiple testers can access the controllers, schedule jobs, and review job results, simultaneously.

Note  : This release of DTM does not support enterprise scenarios, wherein controllers communicate directly with each other to share clients and distribute scheduled jobs. That is, DTM does not support load-balancing.

Typically, there are two ways to organize your controller and client lab resources:

1. Allocate fewer controllers, each with many clients connected to them.

   Advantages: You will have less overhead administering the controllers and clients. Also, the chances are higher for a client with the necessary hardware and software configuration to be available, or become available shortly, to execute a scheduled job.

   Disadvantages: Adds more latency to the DTM controller. DTM Studio menu items will be slower to respond and jobs slower to launch.

2. Allocate more controllers, each with fewer clients connected to them.

   Advantages: Any given controller will be more responsive because it has fewer clients communicating with it. You can reduce overall latency.

   Disadvantages: You will have more overhead administering, especially if you intend to schedule similar jobs from multiple controllers, because you must manually set up the jobs on each controller. Controllers will not automatically pass jobs between each other.

If you configure your controllers to run on high performance/high resource hardware, they will be able to handle more clients.

Note  : Multiple controllers are independent of each other.

DTM puts a limit of 150 clients that can connect to a single controller. If you have a large lab that has more than 150 computers intended to be clients, you must allocate multiple controllers. Regardless of the size of your lab, you can allocate multiple controllers, each with any number of clients (up to 150 per controller) connected to a given controller.

Note  : Installing DTM Studio does not count toward the limit of 150 clients per controller.

The following table describes example scenarios for labs of different sizes.

Number of computers	Minimum number of DTM controllers to allocate	Number of DTM clients to allocate	Configuration
2 to 10	1	1 to 9	Allocate a single controller that will have 1 to 9 clients connected to it. The remaining computers all become clients of the controller.
11 to 151	1 or more	1 to 150	Allocate at least one controller, and possibly more. For example, you can allocate one controller that can have up to 150 clients. Or, you can allocate two controllers and distribute the computers as their clients in an arbitrary manner. The decision about the ratio in which to allocate clients to controllers is completely at your discretion.
152 or more	2 or more	150 or more	You must allocate at least two or more controllers for labs that contain more than 150 clients because this release of DTM supports only a maximum of 150 clients per controller.

 

Note  : To use DTM to obtain a logo, all tests must be performed from a single controller. You cannot combine results from multiple controllers to obtain a logo.

 

 

Build date: 9/14/2012