What a.p. mentioned makes lot of sense. All though it is a test environment it is very important that it "stays" test environment. Most of the time test environment becomes prod environment 
You can have your DC as VM too. Try to understand your user base so that you can carve out proper Windows 7 VM resource. Storage is very important for View environment. You wan to make sure that the performance stays consistent during the entire testing process. I think you should also look into vCOPS for monitoring.
Hope this helps.