jMeter 2.9 & SharePoint 2010

Intro:
So I was tasked to find the cheapest way to apply load onto a SharePoint environment. Found jMeter which lots of people raved about.

My sample SharePoint environment is:
Windows 2012 Standard
SharePoint 2013
JMeter 2.9

Symptoms/Issue:
So I created a simple load test to hit the default page of my site collection but all I got were 401s.
Response code: 401

Response message: Unauthorized

HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized

How to create a basic page request in JMeter for SharePoint:

1. Download Java Runtime Environment: http://www.java.com/en/download/index.jsp
2. Download JMeter: https://jmeter.apache.org/download_jmeter.cgi
3. Extract JMeter.
4. Run jmeter.bat from the bin folder.
5. Right click Test Plan > Add > Threads (User) > Thread Group
6. Right click on "Thread Group" > Add > Sampler > HTTP Request
7. In the new HTTP Request you just added:
8. Server Name or IP: uri of your site collection (without the http(s)). For example if the landing page of my site collection is: http://spdev/Pages/Default.aspx. You would just have spdev in this field.
9. Port Number: can be left blank if using port 80.
10. Implementation: Java <- this is the step I had to change to get this whole thing to work for me.
11. Path: in this example I put /Pages/Default.aspx
12. Right click on "Thread Group" > Add > View Results in Table (or View Results Tree).
13. Now click: Run > Start (or Ctrl + R)