VMWare ESXi announce High Availability (HA) for NVIDIA GRID vGPU VMs with vSphere 6.5

I was very pleased yesterday to see Pat Lee from VMware’s PM team tweet about this yesterday…

It’s something we knew VMware had added to vSphere 2016, vSphere 2016 supported in the GRID 4.1 (Nov 2016) release. As a VMware implemented feature this was something we at NVIDIA had to wait for them to announce. I think there have been a few problems with the documentation update staging which is why this has been a rather quiet feature release. I’ll update this blog with links to the documentation when it becomes available which should be soon!

But since Pat has let the cat out of the bag…. Probably best to answer a few basic questions straing away.

What is High Availability (HA)?

A few FAQs on Azure N-series inc. Do Azure N-Series VMs include NVIDIA GRID software license?

Last week I was at the UK Citrix User Group in London on December 1^st 2016, the day Azure launched a new series of graphics focused. There is an NVIDIA blog as well as a Microsoft one overviewing the technology. Whilst I was there CTP Thomas Poppelgaard and others asked a few questions that I couldn’t answer on the spot, so this blog is a bit of an update for them.

The interest in Azure N-Series which use NVIDIA GRID GPUs via DDA (Direct Device Assignment – essentially pass-through) has been incredible and quite a few questions have come up already.