A CAD Bunny's Big Adventure Through Virtualisation… frolicking with GPUs along the way – by Rachel Berry
Just a quick blog to clear up some FAQs on Microsoft Hyper-V support and NVIDIA GRID.
The GRID 4.1 release support matrix details support for Windows Server OSs. Windows Server OSs also include the Hyper-V role and support for the Hyper-V hypervisor.
Continue reading “NVIDIA GRID and Microsoft Windows Server OSs and Hyper-V”
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. Continue reading “NVIDIA GRID: Citrix HDX adds support for Relative and Absolute Mouse Modes to Linux Receiver”
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.
Continue reading “Optimising TCP for Citrix HDX/ICA including Netscaler”
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.
Continue reading “NVIDIA GRID – A Guide on GPU Metric Integration for Citrix XenServer”
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). Continue reading “NVIDIA GRID: Linux Guest OS support for Linux distributions on Citrix and VMware”
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:
Also recently listed is the x3500 M5:
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. Continue reading “More Lenovo Servers Support NVIDIA GPUs Including the M60”
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
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.
Cisco-NVIDIA Relationship
There are plenty of case studies, whitepapers and webinar recording covering Cisco long-investment in NVIDIA GRID and vGPU too:
Citrix have been making a fair bit of noise about their end-client (Receiver) being available and supported in-conjunction with partner ThinLinx on the Raspberry Pi, which with peripherals is proving a sub-$100 thin-client, capable of handling demanding graphics and frame rates (fps) of 30fps or more (YouTube is usually 30fps).
The Raspberry Pi and other low-cost end-points such as the Intel NUC are capable because they support hardware decode of protocols such as H.264 and JPEG used by HDX/ICA, they have SoC (system on a chip) hardware designed to handle graphics really very well. Continue reading “NVIDIA GRID GPUs perfect for keeping up with the Raspberry Pi and the next generation of end points”
I was so pleased to receive the below invitation to this event coming up in April from Roy Textor who runs DCUG (Deutschsprachige Citrix User Group / German-speaking Citrix User Group). It’s nearly two years since I blogged about the birth of this group, you can read that here. In the time since then Roy has run dozens of user group meetings all over Germany (I’d love you to comment on this blog if you have attended) and the community is going from strength to strength. Continue reading “Free German Citrix User Event with NVIDIA GRID and HDX 3DPro – 18th April 2016”
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.). Continue reading “Scalability benchmarking – XenDesktop 7.7 and Windows 7”
Virtually Visual 