Test your deployment

 

Applies To: Windows Azure Pack

You can test your deployment using the Microsoft Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) for Windows Azure Pack. BPA is a tool that analyzes your components of Windows Azure Pack. It helps you immediately identify many configuration, security, and performance issues, and it recommends best practices to resolve them.

Tip

A “best practice” is a rule or recommendation that is defined by the product’s experts. These rules are configurations or settings that are designed to optimize product performance and prevent security or functionality issues.

When to run BPA for Windows Azure Pack

You should run BPA for Windows Azure Pack to test your installation and to confirm that it is ready to use in a production environment. Ideally, you should run it at the following times:

• Immediately after installing and configuring Windows Azure Pack.

• After changing any Windows Azure Pack settings.

• When you believe Windows Azure Pack performance is suboptimal.

Correcting the issues that you find during these tests can help reduce your total cost-of-ownership for Windows Azure Pack by minimizing downtime and optimizing configuration, security, and performance.

If you’d like to make sure that the tool runs at automated intervals, you can use Task Scheduler. For more information, see Task Scheduler in the Windows Dev Center.

How BPA for Windows Azure Pack works

BPA for Windows Azure Pack works within Microsoft Baseline Configuration Analyzer (MBCA) 2.0 to scan the software configurations of the machine it is installed on. It automatically detects all components that are installed in Windows Azure Pack and compares their configurations against a set of rules. MBCA then lists all noncompliant issues.

Although rule violations, even critical ones, might not always cause problems, they do indicate issues that can result in poor performance, poor reliability, unexpected conflicts or increased security risks.

Warning

BPA for Windows Azure Pack identifies performance and security optimization issues for your installation of Windows Azure Pack, based on a set of rules. Your machines might have additional issues that these rules do not detect.

The following table describes the three possible severity levels for the rules. 

Severity level	Description
Compliant	The component satisfies the conditions of a rule.
Warning	The component is compliant as it is operating currently, but it might not satisfy the conditions of a rule if changes are not made to its configuration or policy settings.
Error	The component does not satisfy the conditions of a best practice rule, and functionality issues can be expected.

BPA provides best practice recommendations in the following categories.

Category name	Description
Security	Security rules measure a component’s relative risk for exposure to threats such as unauthorized or malicious users, or loss or theft of confidential or proprietary data.
Performance	Performance rules measure a component’s ability to process requests and perform its prescribed duties, within the time periods that are expected for the component’s workload.
Configuration	Configuration rules identify component settings that might require modification for the component to perform optimally. Configuration rules can help prevent conflicts that can result in error messages or prevent the component from performing its prescribed duties.
Operation	Operation rules identify possible failures of a component to perform its prescribed duties.