Basically, I have 30 thread groups in my test plan and I would like to run 8 thread groups at a time consecutively until the test plan is done.
The main test plan options only allow parallel testing of all threads of 1 thread group at a time.
Is there any other way to achieve this apart from segmenting the thread groups in different JMX files or toggling them?
I'm entirely sure what you mean but I'm going to assume you want to run 8 thread groups simultaneously for a certain period, and than start another 8 thread groups and run those for a certain period etc.
You could do this quite easily with the Stepping Thread Group plugin: http://jmeter-plugins.org/wiki/SteppingThreadGroup/. You can adjust each thread group's start and end time.
