Load Balancing for Education – Getting Started

During the COVID-19 situation I have been doing some consultancy for schools and colleges looking for a bit of help to support the sudden change to remote schooling and teaching. The range of IT infrastructure varies widely and it’s certainly pushed me out of my comfort zone exploring vendors and solutions I’ve not explored before.

In a large further education or community college there is usually already a reasonable degree of server infrastructure in use (Exchange, Sharepoint) and often some cloud-based applications (typically Microsoft 365). The IT teams in such institutions are typically small and multi-skilled often driven by a single system administrator who does most roles from architecture, software patches, crawling under desks to change cables and providing support to reset student or teacher logins.

Things to know to get started – Recording and Editing Videos or Screen Graphics

For demos, promotional videos, user support calls and assessing graphical performance....

Updated 26/05/2020 to add info on Green Screens, lighting, headsets and a few more products plus some specific hints for teachers looking to record lessons

Rob Beekmans recording a video using his DIY Lightboard – details below

How to Record Graphics?

There are lots of scenarios where it is useful to record graphics:

• To make a support call – a quick video can save a tonne of words and confusion
• To assess performance and quality
• To make instructional videos to demonstrate configurations and set-up steps
• To make promotional videos just showing off the pretty responsive graphics

With the advice from colleagues in the VFX, Cloud/VDI and CAD/AEC/CAE industries we’ve put together a few suggestions including many for the budget conscious of solutions you might want to explore. The products are listed in absolutely no meaningful order with no implied rating. It’s a product space with a lot of competition and many of the products recommended were new to especially me. However, in a space with 1000s of products some personal recommendation helped me limit my search.

Citrix Linux VDA now supports Ubuntu 16.04

Last year I wrote a blog on how to find out which Linux distributions are supported by VMware/Citrix, at the time I struggled to find some of the Citrix info as there wasn’t a master list in their documentation. With the recent 7.12 XenDesktop release though this changed and there’s now a nice clear list in the System Requirement Documentation (at the time of writing for 7.12), this reads:

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:

NVIDIA GRID: Citrix HDX adds support for Relative and Absolute Mouse Modes to Linux Receiver

Update: 14th September 2016 – Receiver For Windows 4.5 released today now adds support for Windows in addition to Linux!

Just a quick blog to highlight the availability on the Citrix HDX/ICA protocol of a feature enabling Relative Mouse mode. This is a particularly interesting for many NVIDIA GRID vGPU and graphical users as it enables better behavior of certain gaming like applications, particularly those favoured in federal simulations (battle and flight-simulators) e.g Bohemia Simulations VBS 2 & 3. Before on certain application without using an addition gamepad device the mouse could behave strangely ending up with the user pointing their barrel at the ground or sky.

Optimising TCP for Citrix HDX/ICA including Netscaler

Marius Sandbu – NGCA (NVIDIA GRID Community Advisor)  aka Clever Viking!

The TCP implementation within Citrix HDX/ICA protocol used by XenDesktop and XenApp and also Citrix Netscaler is pretty Vanilla to the original TCP/IP standards and definition and the out-of-the-box configuration usually does a good job on LAN. However, for WAN scenarios particularly with higher latencies and certain kinds of data (file transfers), Citrix deployments can benefit greatly from some tuning.

NVIDIA GRID – A Guide on GPU Metric Integration for Citrix XenServer

Just a quick blog aimed at those looking to develop GPU hypervisor monitoring products by integrating the NVIDIA GPU metrics exposed by XenServer via their APIs. Really it’s a bit of a guide as to where to find the information provided by Citrix.

Background

NVIDIA GRID: Linux Guest OS support for Linux distributions on Citrix and VMware

I was recently involved in a support inquiry where a user wanted to know if NVIDIA GRID vGPU was available on Linux VDAs with the Linux guest OS, OpenSUSE LEAP (the answer at the time of writing is that it’s NOT!). Finding the answer was a lot harder than I expected as both VMware and Citrix documentation took a bit of hunting around.

Much of the marketing around Linux VDA’s mentions support for “SUSE”, “CentOS” or other genres of Linux, such as this blog. It is important that customers check both their hypervisor and VDI solutions official support matrix as both Citrix and VMware only certify, QA and support specific versions of Linux Guest OSs (usually only enterprise supported versions).

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.