During many of the Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) projects I work on, the discussion always turns to performance. “So Mike, how to we need to scale the machines?” Is the virtual hardware powerful enough? Do we have sufficient memory? How many CPU cores should the Certification Authority have? Is our Hardware Security Module (HSM) fast enough? Will disk I/O become a bottleneck? And perhaps the simplest question of all:
How fast is Active Directory Certificate Services actually?
Another challenge I regularly encounter is the need for a realistic Certification Authority database. Whether demonstrating reporting capabilities, validating certificate templates, testing custom PowerShell scripts, or creating a representative lab environment, an empty CA database simply does not reflect production. After searching for a suitable solution, I realized that nothing really existed that combined realistic certificate generation with meaningful performance benchmarking. Existing tools either focused on enrollment or stress testing, but none provided detailed insight into where certificate issuance time was actually spent….so I built one.
The AD CS Benchmark & Performance Analysis Toolkit is a PowerShell-based utility that generates realistic PKCS#10 certificate requests, submits them through the native ICertRequest2 COM interface, optionally creates matching Active Directory objects, and records detailed timing information for every stage of the enrollment process.
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