Case study – NVv4, Azure, Citrix BIM customer TBI

Last March 2020, I wrote about the availability of the AMD NVv4-series powered by AMD CPU/GPU. I have been working with NVv4-series and I am excited to share one of the customers, I have helped are now an official reference customer for NVv4-series.

TBI, is a dutch BIM customer, I have been working together with a couple of years designing their on-prem which is now a hybrid platform. They are the first official customer case study using AMD NVv4 instances in Azure together with Citrix Cloud. They have been using VDI for several years and been one of the leading innovators using high end graphics for VDI for their BIM users. Microsoft, Autodesk, Citrix uses them as reference customer through the years.

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NVIDIA vGPU Software 12

It’s time to plan updating your NVIDIA Enterprise GPUs. NVIDIA vGPU Software 12 is now GA.

NVIDIA vGPU software includes vWS, vCS, vPC, and vApps.

If you got any of followin NVIDIA GPU’s: M6, M10, M60, P4, P6, P40, P100, V100, T4, RTX6000, RTX8000, A100, A40, RTXA6000.

If you are interested in a quick overview of which NVIDIA enterprise GPU is supporting which hypervisor, Guest os and remoting technology, I highly recommend you check out this link from NVIDIA that provides the NVIDIA vGPU software product support matrix.

NVIDIA vGPU software 12 is supported until January 2022.

NVIDIA vGPU software 12 is a new-feature branch support. If you are looking for Long-Term support branch latest release is 11.x or 8.x

I this article, I am also covering which Public Cloud instance is available with NVIDIA GPUs and which license is BYO or provided by the public cloud provider such as Azure, AWS, GCP, Alibaba.

For a list of validated server platforms, refer to NVIDIA vGPU Certified Servers.

Important note for EUC (Citrix/VMware customers):

  • NVIDIA vGPU 12.0 is supported with VMware Horizon 2006 (8.0), 7.13, 7.12, 7.11, 7.10, 7.9, 7.8, 7.7, 7.6, 7.5, 7.4, 7.3, 7.2, 7.1, 7.0
  • NVIDIA vGPU 12.0 is only supported with Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops (LTSR) 7.15, 7 1912, (CR) 7 2006, 7 2012

This release includes the following software:

  • NVIDIA vGPU Manager version 460.32.04 for following hypervisors. (Citrix Hypervisor, VMware vSphere, RHEL KVM)
  • NVIDIA Windows driver version 461.09
  • NVIDIA Linux driver version 460.32.03

New Features in Release 12.0

  • Support for NVIDIA® GPU Operator
  • Support for NVIDIA®NVSwitch™ on-chip memory fabric
  • Miscellaneous bug fixes

Hardware and Software Support Introduced in Release 12.0

  • Support for the following GPUs:
    • NVIDIA A100 HGX 80GB
    • NVIDIA A40
    • NVIDIA RTX A6000
  • Support for Windows 10 October 2020 Update (20H2) as a guest OS
  • Support for Red Hat CoreOS 4.7 as a guest OS
  • Support for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP2

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Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops 7 2012

Its almost end of the year and time for Christmas. What a year its been but hopefully you all been busy 😉 Citrix have released a new version of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop 7 2012. So its time to upgrade your environment before X-mas or between X-mas and New Year 😉 and have a fresh start for 2021.

Release is now available for download, December, 2020.

Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktop 7 2012 is a CR release. Read more about CR here

Citrix Virtual Apps (former name: XenApp) Citrix Virtual Desktop (former name: XenDesktop)

Citrix raises the bar of for user experience and new product release of following technologies:

  • Director 2012
  • Virtual Delivery Agents 2012 for ServerOS and ClientOS
  • Virtual Delivery Agent 2012 for Linux
  • Citrix Federated Authentication Service 2012
  • Provisioning 2012
  • Profile Management 2012
  • Workspace Environment Management 2012
  • Session Recording 2012
  • Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop Service
  • Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop Standard for Azure
  • Citrix Cloud Health Check
  • Workspace App 2012 for Windows
  • Workspace App 2012 for Windows (Store)
  • Workspace App 2012 for Linux
  • Workspace App 2012 for Chrome
  • Workspace App 2012 for Android
  • Workspace App 2012 for MacOS
  • Workspace App 2012 for HTML5
  • Workspace App 2012 for ChromeOS

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Transforming BIM to Remote Workspace with HPE Edgeline, NVDIA and Citrix

HPE Edgeline BIM/Engineering Workstation – Overview

The new offerings have new enhanced GPU capability with the HPE Proliant m750 and providing a dedicated GPU from NVIDIA more specific the NVIDIA P1000 or NVIDIA T4. 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 1-499 users.

Challenges with CAD workstations today

  • Engineers are chained to desk
  • Not flexible with getting compute as they need
  • No scalable solution
  • Data requires to be copy down from network locations and can take long time
  • Data requires to be modified quickly and takes long time with synchronising−Engineers can’t work on any device 

Transforming high end workspace to current working style

Benefits of replacing physically BIM workstations with HPE remote workstations.

  • Move physically workstation to a central location and unchain engineers for their desk
  • Work from Home−Centralizing compute
  • Benefit of a scalable GPU solution
  • 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 dedicated and guaranteed user experience

Expanding the bare metal VDI family

HPE now have 3 hardware solutions and its 3 different form factors.

  • HPE Moonshot 1500
  • HPE Edgeline EL4000
  • HPE Edgeline EL8000 / EL8000t

HPE now supports Citrix CVAD on all Moonshot/Edgeline solutions with bare metal but also running virtualised with Citrix Hypervisor & Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktop.

I am proud to share that I was interviewed as part of HPE announcement of the new Bare Metal VDI for Engineering & BIM workstations; see the above video where you can see the new HPE Moonshot/Edgeline offerings and also a customer sharing their experience.

Citrix supporting Bare Metal

Citrix has been supporting bare metal setup for a while actually let’s dig into the facts.

  • Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops (XenDesktop) has been supporting Bare metal since 2009 when HDX 3D Pro got available, which is 11 years. The technology was made in 2006 but first GA with deep compression codec in 2009.

HPE Edgeline and Citrix Cloud Architecture

Let’s dig in to the architecture.

HPE Edgeline and Citrix Cloud Virtual Apps & Desktops show in the below picture you can use Citrix cloud, but it’s also fully supported with onprem Citrix CVAD infrastructure if you have a requirement for that. You can use a thin client from HP T740 which is the best hardware thin client on the market that also can decode multiple 4K monitors without any user experience gets impacted. The great thing about below archictecture is you can have 4 physical workstation’s in 1U centralised in your datacenter or edge location without compromising user experience with virtualising. The power of bare metal is you get exactly what the hardware can deliver. Now that said, if you wanna virtualise below hardware, you can do that with no issues and it is fully supported as well.

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Transforming BIM to Remote Workspaces with HPE Edgeline, NVIDIA and VMware

HPE Edgeline BIM/Engineering Workstation – Overview

The new offerings have new enhanced GPU capability with the HPE Proliant m750 and providing a dedicated GPU from NVIDIA more specific the NVIDIA P1000 or NVIDIA T4. 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 1-499 users.

Challenges with CAD workstations today

  • Engineers are chained to desk
  • Not flexible with getting compute as they need
  • No scalable solution
  • Data requires to be copy down from network locations and can take long time
  • Data requires to be modified quickly and takes long time with synchronising−Engineers can’t work on any device 

Transforming high end workspace to current working style

Benefits of replacing physically BIM workstations with HPE remote workstations.

  • Move physically workstation to a central location and unchain engineers for their desk
  • Work from Home−Centralizing compute
  • Benefit of a scalable GPU solution
  • 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 dedicated and guaranteed user experience

Expanding the bare metal VDI family

HPE now have 3 hardware solutions and its 3 different form factors.

  • HPE Moonshot 1500
  • HPE Edgeline EL4000
  • HPE Edgeline EL8000 / EL8000t

HPE now supports VMware Horizon on all Moonshot/Edgeline solutions with bare metal but also running virtualised with VMware ESX & VMware Horizon.

I am proud to share that I was interviewed as part of HPE announcement of the new Bare Metal VDI for Engineering & BIM workstations; see the above video where you can see the new HPE Moonshot/Edgeline offerings and also a customer sharing their experience.

VMware Horizon supporting Bare Metal

VMware has been supporting bare metal setup for a while actually let’s dig into the facts.

  • VMware Horizon RDSH has been supporting Bare metal since Horizon 6, which is 6.5 years.
  • VMware PCoIP has been supporting +10years with host card for bare metal
  • VMware Blast for VDI has been supporting Bare metal for the last 2 years and have been supporting Windows 1803 or 1809.

The big news is that as of today, officially, HPE is supporting VMware Horizon on bare metal in HPE Moonshot and Edgeline. It used to be only Citrix that was positioned the last 7 years and this changes today, which I am really excited about as the platform becomes more open as it should and can benefit customers in the world.

HPE Edgeline and VMware Horizon 8 Architecture

Let’s dig in to the architecture.

HPE Edgeline and VMware Horizon show in the below picture you can use VMware Horizon cloud, but it’s also fully supported with onprem VMware Horizon infrastructure if you have a requirement for that. You can use a thin client from HP T740 which is the best hardware thin client on the market that also can decode multiple 4K monitors without any user experience gets impacted. The great thing about below archictecture is you can have 4 physical workstation’s in 1U centralised in your datacenter or edge location without compromising user experience with virtualising. The power of bare metal is you get exactly what the hardware can deliver. Now that said, if you wanna virtualise below hardware, you can do that with no issues and it is fully supported as well.

Continue reading