need a realistic background load on a Windows OS VM in a cloud testbed that would represent normal cloud behavior. it is essential for the load to have a variable behavior. The aim is to use the testbed to evaluate malware detection techniques. Thanks
It depends on applications and your concern levels. For example, if you are concerns with mutal effects of 2 VMs hosting on the same physical machines, you can start 2VMs on 1 physical machines and run your applications on 1 VM with the other VMs busy and not busy to see the impacts. Otherwise, you can simply do the same on 1 VM. Regarding to the load, you can use TPC-C if your application is OLTP.
Just to focus your question: is it ok to install a webserver on your vms (not necessarily an Apache, there are zero-configuration servers written in python (SimpleHTTPServer), perl, whatever, and target the vms with http GET? Can do the same with an ftp server.