More Lenovo Servers Support NVIDIA GPUs Including the M60

Lenovo have recently qualified and announced support for more NVIDIA GPUs for several servers including the x3650 M5 (E5-2600 v4), details can be found on Lenovo’s site, here:

• https://lenovopress.com/lp0068-lenovo-system-x3650-m5-e5-2600-v4#gpu-adapters

Also recently listed is the x3500 M5:

• https://lenovopress.com/tips1242-system-x3500-m5#gpu-adapters

This means Lenovo have worked with NVIDIA to test and certify that both parties hardware, firmware and software is fully-compatible, thermally and electrically stable.

New Cisco Validated Design featuring UCS B200 M4 with NVIDIA GRID M6 vGPU – available now!

It’s great to see a new validated design released by Cisco in recent weeks. Particularly as this features the NVIDIA GRID M6 options for blade servers to enable virtualized GPU-accelerations (vGPU). This reference architecture joins other available for UCS but in particular features a reference blueprint for Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp 7.7 and VMware vSphere 6.0 for 5000 Seats. Key features include

• Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp 7.7.
• Built on Cisco UCS (including Cisco B200 M4 Blade Server) and Cisco Nexus 9000 Series
• with NetApp AFF 8080EX
• VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0 Update 1 Hypervisor Platform

Cisco have done a great job providing a comprehensive guide and reference for a full VDI/XenApp deployment that includes networking, storage and graphics acceleration considerations.

• You can read it here >> http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/UCS_CVDs/cisco_ucs_xd77esxi60u1_flexpod.pdf

 

Cisco-NVIDIA Relationship

There are plenty of case studies, whitepapers and webinar recording covering Cisco long-investment in NVIDIA GRID and vGPU too:

• Healthcare Whitepaper. Cisco, NetApp, NVIDIA GRID. NetApp Whitepaper.
• Media and Entertainment Whitepaper. Cisco, NetApp, NVIDIA GRID. NetApp Whitepaper.
• Oil and Gas Whitepaper. Cisco, NetApp, NVIDIA vGPU. NetApp Whitepaper.
• Cisco Rack Server C240 C3 Reference architecture for vGPU: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c-series-rack-servers/whitepaper_C11-732283.html
• BLDD Architects. VMware Horizon View +vSPhere. GRID K2, Cisco UCS C240M3, Windows7. Autodesk Revit, Navisworks, and AutoCAD, Bentley RAM, Trimble. NVIDIA Case Study.
• Butler County Community College. Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp. VMware vSphere. SolidWorks, AutoDesk Building Design Suite, Adobe® Creative Cloud. Cisco B200 M3 and C240 M3. Wyse Xenith 1-3’s and old desktop PCs used as thin and zero clients. GRID K2 cards. NVIDIA Case Study.
• Southwest Florida Water District. VMware Horizon View and vSPhere. NVIDIA GRID K2. ESRI ArcGis. Cisco C240.  NVIDIA Webinar. Review Blog.
• Corona-Norco School District; Cisco UCS C-series; Nimble Storage CS700; NVIDIA GRID K1; Autodesk AutoCAD; BYOD support; VMware vSphere 6 and Horizon View 6.2; Cisco Case Study.

GPU Sizer – Community tool seeks Beta Testers

A few lucky folks at E2EVC, a couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas, got a sneak preview of a couple of new community tools for analyzing application usage of NVIDIA GPUS. I have already blogged about Jeremy Main’s GPU Profiler (read about it – here).

The other tool is one from community GPU and virtualisation expert Magnar Johnsen from Norway, who is well-known in the Virtualisation communities for his GPU-enabled deployments and tools. Magnar was in fact one of the community users who we invited to NVIDIA to speak to our engineers and product managers about the future direction of our products and user needs.

GPU Profiler – NVIDIA Community Tool

Just a quick blog to highlight a new community tool written as a hobby project by one of our GRID Solution Architects, Jeremy Main.  As a community tool this isn’t supported by NVIDIA and is provided as is. The advantages of releasing this in this way is that Jeremy has provided the tool on github where partners, customers and the community can access it, discuss enhancements and report bugs.