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HPE Edgeline Engineering Workstation with AMD and Citrix Cloud

HPE Edgeline Engineering Workstation – Overview

Back in 2016 I wrote about the next generation workstation, and things have evolved and at HPE Discover in Madrid, 28th November 2018, HPE announced HPE Edgeline Engineering Workstation with AMD and Citrix Cloud. The new offerings have new enhanced GPU capability with the HPE m710x and providing a dedicated GPU from AMD more specific the AMD Radeon Pro WX4100. The solution requires no hypervisors and lowers complexity while enabling the mobility of users and enhancing user experience. This solution is designed to meet the requirements of power users such as designers, architects and visualizers that require high performance with reduced physical footprint, and targeted towards 4-100 users.

Benefits of replacing physically engineering workstations with HPE engineering workstations.

Move physically workstation to a central location and unchain engineers from their desk
Centralizing compute
Benefit from central datacenter performance accessing the CAD/BIM files
IT Security and IP Protection
Providing mobility to work from any device such as tablet
Providing engineers/designers a great experience thanks to dedicated compute and graphics resources
Save up to 20% in operational cost

AMD Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 18.Q4

AMD have released an important new driver for their AMD Radeon Pro GPUs in November 2018 (18.Q4)

Today, AMD is releasing Radeon™ Pro Software for Enterprise Edition 18.Q4, introducing a new Day Zero Certification Program, updating the Remote Workstation feature, expanding the unified “One Driver” with support for AMD Radeon™ Graphics, boosting productivity with faster performance in some key professional applications, and updating AMD Radeon™ ProRender.

Day Zero Certs Slide

This release is fixing more issues that AMD identified with Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops (aka XenDesktop). The drivers works both with a physically machine with Radeon Pro + Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops (aka XenDesktop) or with a Virtual machine where the AMD Radeon Pro GPU are attached as GPU passthrough or sliced via SR-IOV with S7150/S7150x2 with Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops (aka XenDesktop). I haven’t tested with VMware Horizon yet.

AMD have expanded support for their Remote Workstation feature to include the AMD Radeon™ Pro WX 4100, WX 5100, and newly released WX 8200 graphics cards alongside the originally supported WX 7100 and WX 9100 graphics cards, giving users access to a full GPU-accelerated workstation experience from virtually anywhere with Citrix.

Radeon™ Pro Software for Enterprise’s unified “One Driver” simplifies deployment, and we are now including AMD Radeon™ graphics support in the downloadable Radeon™ Pro Software for Enterprise 18.Q4 unified driver package, bringing many benefits of Radeon™ Pro Software – including stability and better security – to knowledge workers.

The Radeon™ Pro Software for Enterprise is designed to deliver market-leading uptime and stability. Rigorous multi-wave testing and exhaustive ISV certifications help make this “the industry’s most stable driver”¹. Radeon™ Pro Software is certified in over 100 workstation applications including Autodesk® AutoCAD®, Dassault Systèmes® CATIA®, Siemens NX™, Adobe® Premiere® Pro, Avid® Media Composer®, Autodesk® Maya®, PTC Creo® and many more

Built to help content creators make the best, every Enterprise Edition is designed to deliver more quality, performance, security, and simplicity

NVIDIA vGPU Software 7.0

Hi All

Its time to update your NVIDIA TESLA M6, M10, M60, P4, P6, P40, P100, V100 with vGPU software 7.0

The brand “GRID” is now vGPU (Virtual GPU Software) software, in my previously articles I wrote GRID and now its branded vGPU.

NVIDIA have released new drivers for NVIDIA vGPU 7.0 for October 2018.

This release is a major release and include the fully support for VMware vSphere vMotion support for VMs that are configured with vGPU. Another major news is support for Multiple vGPU in a single VM and to a big surprise its supported with Nutanix AHV from 5.5 -> 5.9 + RHEL KVM 5.6-> 5.7. NVIDIA vGPU 7.0 now support Windows 10 (1803), Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6, CentOS 7.6, vGPU support for NVIDIA frame buffer capture metrics from the hypervisor and guest VMs and support for NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) containers, NVIDIA vGPU 7.0 supports NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit 10 For more information about NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit, see CUDA Toolkit 10.0 Documentation. NVENC support for RDSH in Citrix Virtual Apps (aka XenApp).

The big advantage of Citrix XenMotion and VMware vMotion support for vGPU is customers can keep their servers healthy and run patches and upgrade environment easier without end user disruption or data loss. Customers can also run mixed workloads using same infrastructure by repurposing hosts that run VDI during the day to run HPC and other compute workloads at night. Please be aware in current release XenMotion and vMotion is only supported to move VM across host with same NVIDIA GPU type.

Important:

NVIDIA vGPU 7.0 is supported with VMware Horizon 7.6, 7.5, 7.4, 7.3, 7.2, 7.1, 7.0, 6.2
NVIDIA vGPU 7.0 is only supported with Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops (aka XenDesktop) 7.15, 7.17, 7.18, 7 1808 in HDX 3D Pro mode
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5 is no longer supported with NVIDIA vGPU 7.0
If you are a customer using XenServer 7.2, 7.3, 7.4 its no longer supported with NVIDIA vGPU 7.0 and should plan upgrading to XenServer 7.5 or 7.6.
Customer using Citrix XenServer 7.2, 7.3 is supported with NVIDIA vGPU 6.0 & 6.1
Customer using Citrix XenServer 7.4 is supported with NVIDIA vGPU 6.0 & 6.1 & 6.2
Customers using Citrix XenServer 7.0, 7.1, 7.5, 7.6 is supported with NVIDIA vGPU 7.0
Customers using Citrix XenServer 7.0, 7.1 isn’t supported with XenMotion with vGPU

This release includes the following software:

NVIDIA vGPU Manager version 410.68 for the Citrix XenServer, VMware vSphere, RHEL KVM, Nutanix AHV
NVIDIA Windows driver version 411.81
NVIDIA Linux driver version 410.71

AMD Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 18.Q3.1

AMD have released an important new driver for their AMD Radeon Pro GPUs in October 2018.

This release is fixing many major issues that AMD had with Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops (aka XenDesktop), I am very happy to see that the engineers inside AMD worked hard and now everything is working out of the box and no “tweak” have to be done to get it working. The drivers works both with a physically machine with Radeon Pro + Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops (aka XenDesktop) or with a Virtual machine where the AMD Radeon Pro GPU are attached as GPU passthrough or sliced via SR-IOV with S7150/S7150x2 with Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops (aka XenDesktop). I have tested the drivers in my lab with AMD Radeon Pro WX4100 + S7150 and S7150x2 and I can confirm that AMD have fixed below, which is important. I haven’t tested with VMware Horizon yet.

The Radeon™ Pro Software for Enterprise is designed to deliver market-leading uptime and stability. Rigorous multi-wave testing and exhaustive ISV certifications help make this “the industry’s most stable driver”¹. Radeon™ Pro Software is certified in over 100 workstation applications including Autodesk® AutoCAD®, Dassault Systèmes® CATIA®, Siemens NX™, Adobe® Premiere® Pro, Avid® Media Composer®, Autodesk® Maya®, PTC Creo® and many more

Built to help content creators make the best, every Enterprise Edition is designed to deliver more quality, performance, security, and simplicity

Lets Dig in why this is important.

Fixed Issues in 18.Q3.1

Locked Clock Speed with AMD Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 may be seen.
Dassault Systèmes® Solidworks® 2018 may crash at Customer Site while applying service metal fabrications.
“19.Light.vpb” file may show issues while rendering with Autodesk® VRED.
Application launching issues with Siemens NX™ 12.0.2 may be observed.
Some Viewport Corruption may be seen with Blender®.
Some issues may be observed with SPECapc™ Solidworks® 2015.
Solid Color Outputting may be seen on display using Specific DP 1.2 to HDMI 2.0 Dongle.
Dassault Systèmes® Solidworks® 2018/2017 may stop responding after rotating or changing display style on Windows® 7.
DXGI window mode stereo in Stereo 3D may only show left eye image when enabling active/passive stereo in Radeon™ Pro Settings on Windows® 10 RS4.
Application may stop responding while using ‘sliced geometry’ feature in Notch.
Corruption may be seen on model with change in Anti-aliasing modes with Dassault ICEM Surf™.
Display issues may be observed while running Nuke benchmark on AMD FirePro™ W8100 and AMD FirePro™ W9100.
Unexpected behaviour may be observed when running Intergraph SmartPlant FreeView on AMD FirePro™ 7150 with Citrix® XenDesktop®.
Toggling between full screen and windowed mode on Citrix® XenDesktop® may lead to temporary viewport corruption.
On Windows® 7, a Catalyst Control Center error may be observed when resizing Citrix® XenDesktop® window.

NVIDIA vGPU 6.3

Hi All

Its time to update your NVIDIA TESLA M6, M10, M60, P4, P6, P40, P100, V100 with vGPU 6.3

The brand “GRID” is now vGPU (Virtual GPU Software), in my previously articles I wrote GRID and now its branded vGPU.

NVIDIA have released new drivers for NVIDIA vGPU 6.3 for October 2018.

NVIDIA vGPU 6.3 now support VMware Horizon 7.6 and Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktop 7 1808 (aka XenApp/XenDesktop) + Citrix Hypervisor (aka XenServer) 7.6

Important:

NVIDIA vGPU 6.3 is supported with VMware Horizon 7.6, 7.5, 7.4, 7.3, 7.2, 7.1, 7.0, 6.2
NVIDIA vGPU 6.3 is only supported with Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops (aka XenDesktop) 7.15, 7.17, 7.18, 7 1808 in HDX 3D Pro mode
If you are a customer using XenServer 7.2, 7.3, 7.4 its no longer supported with NVIDIA vGPU 6.3 and should plan upgrading to XenServer 7.5 or 7.6.
Customers using Citrix XenServer 7.0, 7.1 is supported with NVIDIA vGPU 6.0
Customer using Citrix XenServer 7.2, 7.3 is supported with NVIDIA vGPU 6.0 & 6.1
Customer using Citrix XenServer 7.4 is supported with NVIDIA vGPU 6.0 & 6.1 & 6.2
Customers using Citrix XenServer 7.5 is supported with NVIDIA vGPU 6.2

This release includes the following software:

NVIDIA vGPU Manager version 390.94 for the Citrix XenServer, VMware vSphere
NVIDIA Windows driver version 392.05
NVIDIA Linux driver version 390.96