NVIDIA GRID: More info on vApps and VPC/vWS Licensing

Check out Luke Wignall’s blog on NVIDIA GRID licensing and other GRID topics!

I wrote a blog on RDSH (including XenApp) licensing and the options available with NVIDIA GRID vGPU and GPU-passthrough a few weeks ago, which you can read – here (including support for multi-monitor and resolutions). Since then my colleague Luke has added some more information in a blog where he outlines various case studies including many on vApps, which is worth a read here:

• https://recidivistic1.wordpress.com/2016/08/25/nvidia-grid-software-licensing/

Luke answers how many licenses and what type you will need for various use cases, answering questions such as:

Dell released NVIDIA GRID Tesla M10 for R730 in EMEA

Quick blog to let you know that Dell released GRID Tesla M10 this week in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). It’s offered as “Customer Kit” for the R730 server.

Dell SKU #: 490-BDIG

This means that – Dell and its partners can quote R730 with M10 and take orders!

NVIDIA GRID – Citrix offers multi-monitor NVENC hardware encode for both Linux and Windows

A few weeks ago I wrote a KB article outlining the support on various virtualization stacks for hardware encode support.using NVIDIA NVENC functionality.  I’m now in the process of having the KB article updated as today Citrix announced with XenDesktop/XenApp 7.11 that they have added support for Windows alongside their existing Linux support.

A few vendors already offered hardware encode for both Linux and Windows such as NICE DVC and HP RGS, however prior to this release from Citrix:

• Citrix only supported Linux
• VMware only supported Windows (and then only single monitor)

This sees Citrix now offer multi-monitor support on both Linux and Windows. I expect VMware will now be under some pressure to match.

Many customers use both Windows and Linux so this parity makes life much easier for the system administrator.

VDI can use GPUs in many ways:

• To accelerate the applications
• For the protocol encoding and decoding e.g H.264 e.g. NVENC
• Allowing protocols access to the frame buffer directly

So solutions without NVENC also do still benefit from GPU availability.

You can read about the HDX/XenDesktop 7.11 enhancements here:  https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/xenapp-and-xendesktop/7-11/hdx/gpu-acceleration-desktop.html

There are also some other big leaps in HDX such as the addition of hardware H.264 4:4:4 encode (removes the artefacts of standard H.264 4:2:0 but at a cost of a bit more bandwidth).

Nicely any Citrix Receiver that also supports H.264 decoding can be used with NVENC hardware encoding (H.264 4:2:0). Which should ease users trialing and adopting.

The protocol war rages on!

NVIDIA GRID – RDSH licensing (including XenApp)

I’ve had a few questions about what licensing is needed under the GRID 2.0 and up software licensing for the M60/M10/M6 GPUs for RDSH solutions such as XenApp. I think the confusion arises because it’s possible to use a number of GPU/vGPU different profiles for a server OS VM. The key point is to remember that the licensing is always per user.