My organization recently created a Performance testing environment. Our primary goal of performance testing is to catch performance degradation with future releases of our application. In Production, our web applications are deployed behind a load balancer, which is written and maintained by another team. To simulate Production environment, a decision was made to have two instances of each web application deployed in Performance environment, and execute performance tests against load balancer.
I feel that it is not an optimal decision, because we do not have control over load balancers, and my idea is to concentrate on testing performance of our application accessed directly via host name. Due to the fact that I lack experience with performance testing, I would like to understand arguments for and against these two different setups, and if I am correct, find necessary arguments to persuade management to change initial decision.