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.

Significant leaps in virtualized NVIDIA vGPU monitoring

Read the documentation – the User Guide provided alongside the managmeent SDK is really comprehensive!

Today NVIDIA announced a new monitoring SDK / API incorporated into its GRID vGPU products as part of their GRID August 2016 (4.0) release. This will be available from Friday 26^th August 2016 as a software release for existing hardware, greatly enhancing the functionality for existing as well as new customers. (You can read the announcement here).

NVIDIA has broken ranks with traditional hardware-only GPU models and recognized enterprises needs software to manage and monitor GPUs as a component of the data centre. Software licensing has enabled existing customers to benefit from new features with fully supported software, directly supported by NVIDIA (you wouldn’t run your Microsoft OS or CAD software unsupported!).

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

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.

Could Deep Learning find the needle in the PDM/PLM haystacks or cloud?

Yowza at D3Live 2016!

Recently I attended the NVIDIA GTC Developers’ conference and spent a little time learning more about the deep learning products. A branch of machine learning that often aims to make better representations and create models to learn these representations from large-scale unlabeled data. Many of the use cases have been associated with text and image search, facial recognition or medical diagnosis (identifying specific cancers, medical problems).

NVIDIA GRID: New knowledge resources – just released!

The NVIDIA Knowledge base is going from strength to strength.  Since GRID moved to a software and fully-supported enterprise model there has been an acceleration in the information being published there that should carry on long-term.

Known issues, workarounds, how-to-guides and links to other places to find information on NVIDIA products including GRID and vGPU.

Yet MORE NEW articles have just been released:

NEW KB Articles – this week!

• A change occurs on the GRID licensing server such as IP address, or a change in account used to manage the licenses on the portal – resulting in error: FNE server is up and running”. May be necessary to delete the trusted store
• FAQs – VMware Blast Extreme and NVIDIA GRID – webinar 22nd March 2016
• End-point monitor / thin-client screen flickers when using NVIDIA GRID vGPU profile insufficient to support end-point native resolution
• Is the NVIDIA M60, K1, K2, K5000, other…. supported by vSphere/XenServer/Other Hypervisor?
• NVIDIA vGPU for XenServer is premium Citrix-licensed feature (includes errors/symptoms if licensing is incorrect)
• Monitoring NVIDIA GRID GPU and CPU metrics for Citrix XenServer including with XenCenter – including is the number of vCPUs per VM correct
• Incorrect BIOS settings on a server when used with a hypervisor can cause MMIO address issues that result in GRID GPUs failing to be recognized.
• Where to find the drivers for NVIDIA GRID 2.0 vGPU and up, including M60 and M6 drivers
• NVIDIA License Server – Changing default management port value
• Can NVIDIA Kepler (e.g. K1 / K2) and Maxwell (e.g. M60 / M6) GPU cards be mixed on a server host?

NEW KB Articles – last week

• Known Issues or Configuration Reasons: OpenGL/DirectX/GPU Acceleration Not Used when using GRID or Quadro products in virtualized environments including VMware and Citrix (links to multiple known issues in other vendors products)
• Monitoring the framebuffer for NVIDIA GRID vGPU and GPU-passthrough
• Autodesk AutoCAD 2016 selecting the wrong display adaptor
• AVID Media Composer requires a certified driver for use with a GPU/vGPU
• Enable GRID GPU acceleration for Adobe Illustrator 2014
• How to Query VBIOS when running vGPU
• What causes error: Source – NVWMI | Level – Warning | Instance and Method provider registration failed – (null) hr=0xFFFFFFFA (-6)?
• Having problems with new M6/M60 like VMs fail to power on, NVRM BAR1 error, ECC is enabled, or nvidia-smi fails (checking cards in graphics not compute mode)

As always I’d recommend a visit to the GRID user forums where you can ask questions with the users who include customers, partners and NVIDIA staff including developers who write the product and support staff: Have a look – HERE!

VMWorld 2016 – VMware let users set the agenda! Go VMware!

VMware Democracy at VMworld – it seems you can vote for what sessions you’d like to see. I think this is a super idea as it allows the community, partners and customers to actually pre-screen the balance of talks and speakers.

This kind of openness where VMworld lets their community see what has been submitted (and subsequently rejected/accepted) is great. It allows others to be aware of potential speakers who whilst might not be suitable for VMworld may fit other events/platforms better. It’s also a very strong message that this conference is for the users. Go VMware!

NVIDIA GRID Knowledge Base – New Articles

Lots of answers and some fascinating tips and how-to-guides on NVIDIA GRID!

Have you visited the NVIDIA Knowledge base recently? Since GRID moved to a software and fully-supported enterprise model there has been an acceleration in the information being published there that should carry on long-term.

Known issues, workarounds, how-to-guides and links to other places to find information on NVIDIA products including GRID and vGPU.