Citrix partners and customers alike are looking to build scalable XenDesktop environments on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and have requested guidance around what to expect when scaling up those environments. The Citrix team, with help from HP and Microsoft, collaborated on creating a large-scale virtual desktop environment at HP’s Houston Solution Center. This document provides the information gathered during that seven-week project.
The virtualization environment was entirely Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. The desktop hosting infrastructure consisted of 3500 desktop virtual machines each receiving a streamed Windows 7 image from Citrix Provisioning Server. The server virtualization infrastructure consisted of 15 virtual machines that hosted the support services for delivering and testing the desktops.
Login VSI 2.1 from Login Consultants was used to simulate the workload inside the virtual desktops. The Login VSI medium level workload consists of Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Adobe tasks executed in a repeating 12-minute loop. The Login VSI script recorded response times so the user experience could be quantified for comparison.

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