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 Image may be NSFW.
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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.