Tutorial: Set up LoadGen Load & Performance Testing for Azure Virtual Desktop

Updated June 25, 2024 07:32

Please note

The LoadGen test infrastructure (LoadGen Director, LoadGen Launcher Agents, and the LoadGen AVD Agents) all communicate with each other (read more about network traffic here). You must either add the LoadGen Director and LoadGen Launcher Agents in Azure as Virtual Machines or make sure you make a Site-to-Site VPN between your Azure AVD VNET and the network on which your LoadGen Director and LoadGen Launcher Agents reside.

Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) is renamed to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD)

But not everything is yet renamed, so in some cases, we still use WVD instead of AVD.

Step 1: Prepare LoadGen for testing or monitoring Azure Virtual Desktop

Before continue reading this article first follow the tutorial: Prepare LoadGen for testing or monitoring Azure Virtual Desktop.

Step 2: Create the LoadGen Azure Virtual Desktop Load Profile

Create a LoadGen Director Canvas
Choose Azure Virtual Desktop
Add a name for your canvas.
Press the Flows tab page.
Create a new Flow or download a community build Workload (Flow) at GO-EUC.

Step 3: Add one or multiple users

The next step is to add the test users that you will use during your test. You need to use existing users from Azure Active Directory (or users who are created on-premises in Active Directory and synchronized to Azure AD). Add these users with the UserPrincipalName (demo@loadgen.com) and the password, leave the domain empty.
You are able to add one or multiple users at once.
Fill in the Username and the Password, leave the NetBIOS Domain empty (for test users we advise you to have the same password for the complete series).
Choose OK.
After you have pressed OK you will see the Testusers tab page in the LoadGen Configurator, press Next.

Step 4: AVD User Traffic

With a LoadGen AVD Load Profile, you can connect your test users to different resources.
You can either Retrieve Resources (directly from AVD) or add them manually by clicking Manage Repository of Resources.

Retrieve Resources
If you want to retrieve AVD resources directly make sure to add the Directory (tenant) and Application (client) Ids in the Target Environment tab page first.
Make sure to add a resource to each test user.

Step 5: LoadGen Agents

LoadGen Launching Agents and LoadGen AVD Agents

If you want to test AVD you have to install the LoadGen Agent on the machine which launches sessions, as well as on the AVD VDI machine itself. You can install the LoadGen Agent manually on the VDI machine, read more about the manual installation of the LoadGen Agent for VDI in this article.

LoadGen Agent versus LoadGen AVD Agents

The LoadGen Agent is the AVD Session Launcher, it will use the Remote Desktop client to actually launch the session in the context of the user. The LoadGen AVD Agent gets triggered by the LoadGen Director and will start the actual user simulation/workload.

In this step you need to set up your LoadGen Agents, you can add any machine in your IT environment, read more about LoadGen Agents in this article.
We advise you to add your local machine just to get familiar with LoadGen Agents and add more LoadGen Agents from the LoadGen Director at a later moment.
In both steps (LoadGen Agents and AVD Agents) you will see the Manage / Manage AVD Agents button which will show you the following form:
Here you can perform multiple actions regarding the installation of the LoadGen Agents. As mentioned earlier you can add the LoadGen Agent into the golden image of the AVD machine.

Step 6: Load Scenario

A Load Scenario holds up 1 or more phases (Load Ramp-Up) where vUsers are triggered to start their session and thus place load or stress on the back-end infrastructure. In the full version, you also can use Custom Actions where you can send emails or start processes on multiple events during a load test. Read more about Load Scenarios in this article.

Step 7: Target Environment

In the Target Environment, you can add the Application (Client) Id and Directory (Tenant) Id with the information from step 3 item 6.

Step 8: Systems Under Test

You can monitor the performance of a machine in your environment during a test or End-to-End monitoring. This will give you diagnostic information and insight into how your environment is performing in correlation to application performance, read more here.

Step 9: Set up a datastore

Before starting a test make sure you have set up a data store so you can store the results in your database. For the data model LoadGen uses, read this article. For setting up the data store read this article.