RD Virtualisation Host Capacity Planning in Windows Server 2008 R2

By Matt McSpirit - virtualboy. Microsoft Partner Technology Specialist for Virtualization;
http://blogs.technet.com/mattmcspirit

Hat-tip to Clive for spotting this one.

A few months back, I blogged about the release of a number of RDS related resources, whether it’s the improvements in RDP7, or sizing guidance for your session hosts, but what about sizing VDI deployments?  How do we accurately capacity plan for the hosts to hold virtual desktops?  Well, this guide is something you may just find useful.

For those of you not in the know…

The Remote Desktop Virtualization Host (RD Virtualization Host) role service lets multiple concurrent users run Windows-based applications on a remote virtual machine running Windows client operating systems.  This white paper is intended as a guide for capacity planning of RD Virtualization Host in Windows Server 2008 R2. It describes the most relevant factors that influence the capacity of a given deployment, methodologies to evaluate capacity for specific deployments, and a set of experimental results for different combinations of usage scenarios and hardware configurations

As you can see from the table of contents below, there are a number of aspects covered, in a good amount of detail, and should give you more than enough information to get going:

• Introduction    4
• Capacity planning goals and approaches    5

• Testing methodology    6

• Test bed configuration    6
• Load generation    8
• Response time measurement    9
• Scenarios    11

• Examples of test results for different scenarios    13

• Tuning Your Server to Maximize Capacity    14

• Memory    15
• Storage    15
• CPU    17

• Conclusions    19
• Appendix A: Test Hardware Details    21
• Appendix B: Testing Tools    22

• Test control infrastructure    22
• Scenario execution tools    22

• Appendix C: Test Scenario Definitions and Workflow    24

• Knowledge Worker v2.1    24

• Appendix D: Remote Desktop Virtualization Host Settings    27
• Appendix E: Connection Broker Settings    28
• Appendix F: Guest Virtual Machine Settings    29

Lots of bedtime reading there!