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)?

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:

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!).

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.

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.

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.

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.

NVIDIA GRID – May 2016 upcoming webinars

No boring recordings or scripted sales waffle on an NVIDIA webinar – just lots of real engineers and specialists willing to answer questions on the fly!

Golly gosh! There’s a lot of interest in GRID and GPU-sharing/virtualized graphics at the moment. So much so that the GRID team together with a number of partners are laying on a series of webinars to satisfy the demand for information stemming from recent VMware announcements and pre-Synergy interest around Citrix. So here’s a list for your diaries (even if you can’t make it – sign up and you will usually get sent the recording).