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SCVMM as a platform

While most people are aware of SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager) being used for managing virtualized datacenters, it’s probably less well known that  a number of partners have built products using SCVMM as a platform by using the powershell based API.  Products that use SCVMM as a platform include Citrix XenDesktop, Quest vWorkspace and Visual Studio Lab Management (this is not an exhaustive list by any means).  Two of those products (XenDesktop and Quest workspace) are VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) management products that can be used to manage VDI desktop VMs.

VDI

VDI management has different usage patterns compared to server virtualization management. For example, VDI VMs are powered on during the morning when the users need to log on to their desktops and they get powered off in the evening after users log off (all this is controllable via policy). So it’s fairly common to power on large number of VMs in a short period of time which causes a spike in load on VMM to handle large number of parallel jobs. These kind of spikes in load can cause the system to become overloaded. While we continue to make improvements in future versions of SCVMM to handle such scenarios, this post is about best practices for configuring SCVMM 2008 R2 for managing VDI environments. The size of the environment is around 1000 desktop VMs, if you have larger environments, you’ll probably need to use multiple instances of SCVMM

to read the full article : http://blogs.technet.com/b/vishwa/archive/2011/02/01/tuning-scvmm-for-vdi-deployments.aspx