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VDI Design Guide—Azure Virtual Desktop on Dell Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI
Solution Introduction Solution Architecture Validation Sizing the Solution
Sizing guidelines
Scaling guidelines
Backup and Restore Summary References Appendix A: Definition of performance metrics

Scaling guidelines

Home > Workload Solutions > Virtual Desktop Infrastructure > Design and Implementation Guides > VDI Design Guide—Azure Virtual Desktop on Dell Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI > Scaling guidelines

Scaling guidelines

  • Add physical and virtual servers to the server pools to scale horizontally. Add virtual resources to the infrastructure to scale vertically.

    Scaling out

    Azure Stack HCI is designed to be a scalable solution: from a simple, two-node system to enterprise-level deployments with 16 nodes.

    When it comes to enterprise scale, the linear scalability of performance with Azure Stack HCI is yet another benefit. As you add more nodes to your clusters, performance will grow nearly linearly, making it much easier to do capacity planning and management.

    Guided scale-out cluster expansion helps customer eliminates guesswork and dramatically decreases time on the cluster expansion scenarios by acting as a preparation for node expansion.

    The following prerequisites are checked during the HCI configuration profile checks:

    • All nodes are from Dell Technologies (AX nodes for Windows Server HCI).
    • All nodes are from Dell Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI (should be in the support matrix and should be supported for Azure Stack HCI operating system).
    • All nodes in the cluster are of the same Dell server/node model.

    Scaling up

    Add extra Azure Virtual Desktop VMs to increase VDI desktop capacity. These VMs can be Azure Arc-registered for management purposes. The maximum number of VMs should not exceed 1,024 per host (Hyper-V limitation).

    With a tested configuration of 416 Task Worker VDI desktop user sessions per physical host, this would scale up to 6,656 sessions on a 16-node cluster. And with a tested configuration of 290 Knowledge Worker VDI desktop user sessions per physical host, this would scale up to 4,640 sessions on a 16-node cluster.

    As there is no need for SAN storage with Azure Stack HCI, storage scaling-up can be achieved by adding extra drives to the hosts’ empty drive slots, which are left available for future expansion. The maximum allowed storage configuration on an AX-750 node is 184 TB. ASHCI volume size is limited to 64 TB.