One of the things I am working on at the moment is a VDI design based on a smallish branch office architecture. If you are familiar with VDI, you will know that one of the key metrics is the number of IOPs that the back-end storage needs to support. Historically, VDI projects underestimated this figure or the storage was unable to deliver what was required.
What would be useful is an I/O simulator, a disk subsystem on which you could tweak the IOPs performance to see what effect it had on guests. This idea has been looked at very successfully by Jim Moyle with the Atlantis ILIO product and he has written some great papers on the results.
But I wondered if a basic form of simulation could be done using VMware’s storage IO control (SIOC) or one of the storage appliances available from the virtual appliance marketplace (StorMagic and FalconStor are two options on the front page of the VA marketplace).
It would be worth investigating these options which may pay great dividends in a VDI design exercise. The Rolls-Royce solution would be a complete simulation of every layer in the VDI stack, of course. Network, broker, server and storage.