Monitoring NVIDIA vGPU for Citrix XenServer including with XenCenter

Real customers setting up GRID in the GTC 2016 hands-on; the following week the SA team tried it out on their colleagues including novices to GRID!

I had some fun at NVIDIA GTC 2016 taking part in a hands-on lab run by the SA (Solution Architecture) organisation of which I am a part. These labs are proving really useful for walking new-users to GRID through key operations on both VMware and Citrix stacks. The guys running it mooted adding more on monitoring once you have got set-up and I kind of volunteered to have a crack at a bonus chapter for the hands-on around monitoring on Citrix.

Free Webinar – 9am PST, 5th May 2016 – NVIDIA GRID, Atlantis – Leveraging flash, SDS and GPU!

Just a quick blog to let you know that NVIDIA’s GRID guru Jason Southern will be joining a panel of experts to talk about Storage and GPU usage and benefits selecting the right storage can have for TCO and user experience.

• You can >>> sign up here.

I’d recommend this webinar as the experts also include both Dane Young and Ruben Sprujit, long-time VDI veterans with a wealth of experience across VMware, Microsoft, Citrix an networking technologies.

NVIDIA M60 / M6 Problems – check your card in “graphics” mode!

This blog only applies to M60 / M6 (Maxwell generation) GRID cards. It is not relevant to GRID 1.0 (K1/K2 cards).

Try this first!

If you are experiencing issues with a new M60 / M6 card, please run this command:

•  lspci –n | grep 10de

You should get something that looks like:

[root@SAGRID-ESXi5:~] lspci –n | grep 10de

0000:04:00.0 Class 0300: 10de:11bf [vmgfx2]

0000:05:00.0 Class 0300: 10de:11bf [vmgfx3]

0000:08:00.0 Class 0300: 10de:11bf [vmgfx0]

0000:09:00.0 Class 0300: 10de:11bf [vmgfx1]

0000:86:00.0 Class 0300: 10de:11bf [vmgfx4]

0000:87:00.0 Class 0300: 10de:11bf [vmgfx5]

If your system reports 0302 instead of 0300, the GPU is in “compute” mode. If it reports 0300 as above then it’s in “graphics” mode and this is not the cause of your issue.