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We used similar infrastructures for our site-to-site, remote-access and high-availability tests. An Extreme Networks Summit48i device created separate VLANs and performed routing between our Internet subnets. We used a Cisco Systems 2600 router for testing NAT (network address translation) traversal.

Site-to-Site and Remote Access Test Bed Click here to enlarge

Funk Software's Steel-Belted Radius on Microsoft Windows 2000 provided user authentication. The clients operated on 600-MHz Intel Celeron Pentium machines running Windows 98. We also used a workstation running Windows 2000 SP2 for management purposes.

Using CMP Metrics for VPNs, we tested client throughput and confirmed that each vendor's client software could encrypt at greater than 2 Mbps. We used Spirent Communications' SmartFlow 1.40 for throughput testing of the VPN gateways. This was done over four tests with 64-, 256-, 512- and 1,024-byte packets, contained in a single site-to-site 3DES IPsec tunnel. For high-availability testing, we brought up a client tunnel and failed one of the VPN gateways by pulling the Ethernet cable.