Benchmark Driven Virtual Desktop Planning: A Case Study from Telecom Operator

Virtual desktop is an emerging technology of cloud computing, which has been widely adopted and deployed in the industry. But current virtual desktop planning is not efficient when scaling out, because there are relatively immature methodology and few tools. For telecom operators this problem is more complicated due to their diverse user groups and special business requirements. This paper presents a methodology of benchmark-driven virtual desktop planning for telecom operators, its core idea is capturing typical user activities of telecom operator business and replaying them for simulating workloads to evaluate the planning of virtual desktop. Significantly different to conventional benchmarking, voice transmission within virtual desktop is also taken into account in our design because of special interest of telecom operators. This benchmark-driven method can be used for solving key problems in virtual desktop planning of telecom operators such as network environment, resource pool scale and audio transmission schema. A case with this method to perform planning is presented in this paper with experimental results, which demonstrates that our method can meet the requirements of telecom operator businesses such as business hall, call center and office automation. The proposed method has been successfully applied in large-scale virtual desktop deployment in China Telecom.