Hello everyone. I joined on a recommendation from an associate of mine who thinks nginnx may be the solution I am looking for.

I have an in-house project that needs a very high-performance, scalable network I/O framework. We have a network application that needs to be deployed across several hundred IP addresses. For testing, we would like to virtualize this by emulating those IP addresses and their associated servers on a small number of physical servers in a lab. Using standard virtualization technology would be far too cumbersome and slow (not to mention expensive.)

So we are looking at existing network applications that are capable of handling many thousands of network clients -- namely web servers like Apache and nginx.

At this point I have two basic questions: Is it possible for nginx to handle any arbitrary protocol (such as our proprietary one,) on any port? Secondly, its it possible to manage nginx via either the web or some kind of GUI (this is also a requirement for me -- a GUI dashboard.)

I hope the answers to both questions is a resounding "yes". Nginx looks to be nice tool to add to my collection!