Free Webinar 23rd Feb 2016: HP, NVIDIA and VMware – Avoiding VDI Pitfalls: Learn from the Experts

Jason has done thousands of real world VDI accelerated by GPU technologies and trains many of NVIDIA’s staff – The guru!

Just a quick blog to let you know NVIDIA’s very own vGPU/graphics/VDI guru, Jason Southern will be on a panel of similar experts for an interactive webinar hosted by Windows IT Pro.

It should be a brilliant opportunity to ask Jason and experts from VMware and HP in-depth questions about deployments. Even if you aren’t sure you can make it – do sign-up as you’ll probably get a recording! I’ve blogged about Jason’s work and brilliant how-to-videos before, so you can check out his credentials in advance from links on my blog, here!

Having the full-stack of experts with deep technical knowledge, as well as the interactive nature should make this special. To have server, GPU and VMware solutions engineers and experts in one place really will cover all your questions and give you the full picture!

Is my NVIDIA M60, K1, K2, K5000 or my AMD Firepro W7000 supported by vSphere/XenServer/Other Hypervisor?

This is a question I continually see from customers and even those involved in deploying the technologies. The reasons behind the answer are quite complicated, but the answer itself is a simple yes or no, and the steps to find it out are very easy, once you know them.

Mode switching on NVIDIA M60 (GRID 2.0) cards – modeswitch tool

Update (24th Feb 2016): Jason Southern has published an overview and how-to-guide on this tool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAQhiNNFXxQ&feature=youtu.be

 

I had an enquiry this week asking what the “modeswitch tool” is and when a user should use it. Basically a GRID 1.0 K1/K2 user had been to a demo of the new GRID 2.0 M60 GPUs. As he hadn’t got M60 boards yet he didn’t have the tool and hadn’t downloaded it (so hadn’t read the very comprehensive documentation that comes with it explain when and why to use it) but he’d remembered some information from the demo and was trying to extrapolate that to his GRID 1.0 K1/K2 cards.

Scalability benchmarking – XenDesktop 7.7 and Windows 7

When I worked at Citrix one of my now colleagues at NVIDIA (Jason Southern) came to us with a proposal and PoC (you can read the blogs about that experiment, here) for us to implement templates to assist users to configure and optimize HDX graphics for XenDesktop and XenApp (Template details – here). XenDesktop/XenApp 7.6 FP3 saw the release of these templates which allowed users to configure their graphics for the specific needs of their users (user experience vs. server scalability) and network conditions (WAN/limited bandwidth etc.).

Limitations in monitoring shared NVIDIA GPU technologies

A physical GPU can be shared in a number of ways such as NVIDIA vGPU with Citrix XenDesktop or XenApp or GPU-sharing with XenApp (this is actually a form of pass-through with the sharing done at the RDS layer), or used 1:1 with VMs in VDI with GPU pass-through.

When using a pass-through mechanism the