Over the last several years, many of us in the industry have discussed the need for community driven End User Computing podcasts focusing on virtualization topics for people designing, deploying, and using Citrix, Microsoft, VMware and surrounding†technologies. I am excited to share that this month, two new Podcasts are being launched! First, a warm congratulations to Jarian Gibson and Andy Morgan on the successful launch of their Podcast, Frontline Chatter. Here’s to many years of continued success! Next, allow me to introduce the End User Computing Podcast!
Citrix have released a major release of their hypervisor XenServer 6.5
I have with this blogpost gathered all the public informations available and created a blogpost on what I think is new with Citrix XenServer 6.5 and why this is great and how you can use this.
LoginVSI GFX requires you to have Fraps installed on your either VDI or XenApp server.
To get Fraps working correctly, you might run into the issue I have been having. UAC will not allow it to run or if you have UAC disable, you still get a UAC prompt.
This article describes how to get Fraps working in a multisession environment Microsoft Remote Desktop Services 2012R2, Citrix XenApp 7.5 with Login VSI Graphics Framework.
I am very excited to share this great news with you all. I did a webinar with fellow CTP Trond Eirik Håvarstein from XenAppBlog.com, and we had a special guest surprise Jeroen Van De Kamp CTP and CTO, LoginVSI announcing ground breaking stuff in the webinar. We had over 700 people signed up for the Webinar, if you was among the crowd that missed the opportunity to see the webinar here is your chance, the webinar is now available for everyone for free. There was a lot of Q/A and I will the next couple of days reply to all the Q/A and make them available in this article.
The webinar has been re-mastered and the audio & graphical demo videos is even better now than in the actual webinar, make sure to check it out now:
Summary of webinar product announcements from LoginVSI, Lakeside Software, Uberagent for Splunk.
LoginVSI upcoming new version support’s GPU benchmark…
LoginVSI is working on next version that will support benchmark, capacity planning, stress testing the “missing component in virtualization” GPU. If you are interested you can write to get access to the beta version of LoginVSI.
Here are some screen shots from the session…. watch it to here what Jeroen tells about the upcoming version
Note if you want to get more info on the next version of LoginVSI that supports GPU, write to info@loginvsi.com subject GFX
Another groundbreaking product announcement was from Lakeside Software, they are about to release version 7 of Systrack that will support NVIDIA GPU Monitoring/assessing.
Application Graphics Benchmarking
The transformation of an existing software portfolio first begins with the identification of all of the actively used software packages in the environment. The added complication in the case of a project to begin advanced application delivery is the need to understand multiple facets of usage: resource consumption, graphics utilization, frequency of use, user access habits, and mobility needs. Because the state of IT is already so complex it only becomes possible to fully understand and plan with a complete set of descriptive information that really characterizes the unique aspects of every environment. Of particular interest is the ability to first identify applications that have GPU demands, and then begin to segment them into tiers of utilization. SysTrack continually collects information about software packages as they’re used and normalizes all data points for cross platform comparison. One of the key performance parameters that’s identified in this process is a graphical intensity measure (Graphics Index) that provides a way to identify those applications in the portfolio that have higher GPU demands than others. With this critical information it becomes possible to segment the portfolio into groupings based on their requirements for specific resources. By tying a general sense of which applications have peak demand to total length of usage it becomes easier to start developing a portfolio made up of different combinations of usage styles. This includes separating applications that may be used by a small set of the population with intense requirements versus widely used applications with a smaller footprint. Of course, this also allows for much deeper analytics centering on the behaviors of users that is quite important in planning the GPU profiles in use in provisioning. Figure 1 displays this relationship in a bubble chart format, this format groups applications based on their similar characteristics presenting clusters of similar applications in larger bubbles. The vast majority of applications exist in the “low graphics demand – Low Time Active” area in the bottom left, while only a select few have either high graphics demand or high time active.
SysTrackTracks graphics usage frequency across on physical clients and allows you to group users based on graphics usage & frequency
A natural expansion of this is grouping users into distinct workload types to understand how best to configure the profile types and GPU assignments for users. Once the target applications and users have been characterized and a plan has been developed it’s critical to begin the process of sizing the environment. This includes determining the architecture, sizing the desktops and servers that will be worked with, and identifying resources that will be required to support the needs of the planned deployment.
Resource Modeling & Capacity Planning
NVIDIA Marketplace report from Systrack’sVirtual Machine Planner (VMP) outlines the number of users that fall into different use cases making it easier to forecast how many users per board can be allocated
With a complete portfolio plan it now becomes possible to move into the next phase and start creating a model for what resources will be required for a complete environment. Because each of the users have been fully characterized throughout the assessment data collection interval it’s possible to use SysTrack’s Virtual Machine Planner (VMP) for powerful mathematical analysis to provide deep insight into infrastructure provisioning. The first component of this involves using the profile information above to help develop a plan for what kind of solution will be provided to the end-users. By segmenting the population into different delivery strategies using Citrix FlexCast options as a guideline, a more complete and accurate picture of how the net new environment will operate can be created. An additional benefit of segmentation is the ability to take advantage of grouping by general graphics consumption to identify the number of GPUs required for the environment based on the user density information for each profile type
The NVIDIA MarketPlace report from VMP outlines the number of users that fall into the various use cases (e.g. “high” for a designer or higher end power user), making it much easier to forecast how many users per board can be allocated and in turn how many total boards may be needed
This information creates an easy to use design for a set of user profiles, both for the actual desktop delivery and for the vGPU assignment. By ensuring the best possible analysis of the environment prior to the actual deployment the end-user experience is much simpler to forecast and control. This results in higher end-user satisfaction and a shorter transition time.
User Experience Optimization
After the successful implementation of the solution the environment still requires observation to prevent interruption of service and the potential for productivity impact. The best way to ensure optimal end-user service quality is to have a real-time alerting and analytical engine to collect and report instantly on degradation of any aspect of the systems the users interact with. SysTrack provides this in the form of proactive alerting, detailed system analysis in Resolve, and aggregate trending through Enterprise and Site Visualizer. An even more interesting feature is vScape, a tool designed to examine utilization across multiple virtual machines and correlate resource consumption to concurrency of application utilization. vScape provides real-time updates of all of the application usage across all virtual platforms in an enterprise, including information about what applications are currently demanding GPU resources. It also provides insight into other resource demands as well, such as CPU, memory, and I/O. This can help automate the discovery of co-scheduled or highly concurrent applications to pinpoint the root cause of oversubscription issues much more quickly. It also provides key insight into guest health characteristics with trending to correlate precisely which events may lead to service degradation
Another key feature introduced in SysTrack version 7.0 is the result of close collaboration with NVIDIA to leverage APIs presented in the guest operating system. This allows the capture of detailed GPU performance metrics to correlate vGPU consumption to end-user service quality. Specifically, with NVIDIA drivers present in the guest OS or on a physical system, the GPU utilization and key metrics (see table 2 for a sample of selected metrics) from the graphics card can be captured and analyzed in the same way as CPU or other system metrics are currently in SysTrack.
In Systrack 7 after provisioning users in VDI environment the IT admins can monitors performance, which enables to optimize density over time.
This completes the set of KPIs used in SysTrack to calculate the end-user experience score, including categories like resource limitation, network configuration, latency, guest configuration, protocol specific data for ICA, and virtual infrastructure. With a complete set of relevant information the proactive and trending health analysis provided in SysTrack yields a thorough analysis in an easy to understand, quantitative score that summarizes performance on an environmental, group based, or individual system level.
NVIDIA GPU Monitoring/Assessing: (Works with all NVIDIA GPU) Quadro, Kepler, GRID
You will be able to look at following parameters:
Device ID
Power State
GPU Usage
Frame Buffer Usage
Video Usage
Bus Usage
Memory Usage (Bytes and Percent)
# of Apps
Temperatures and Fan RPMS
Use this data to accurately plan and size GRID and HDX 3D Pro deployments based on actually observed usage and utilization.
Monitor users post-deployment to provide the best user experience
UberAgent 1.8 for Splunk adds GPU performance monitoring
Helge Klein have developed a new version of Splunk that now supports monitoring of GPU, this was a feature request I talked with Helge Klein about in 2013, and I am so happy to see the results what he have done with UberAgent for Splunk, lets dig in what it can do.
uberAgent measures:
GPU compute usage per machine
GPU memory usage per machine
GPU compute usage per process
GPU memory usage per process
uberAgent shows memory usage separately for shared and dedicated memory (dedicated = on the GPU, shared = main system RAM)
uberAgent shows compute usage per GPU engine. The various GPU engines serve different functions, e.g. 2D acceleration, 3D acceleration, video decoding, etc.
I am very excited to share my findings of some of the things I do in poppelgaard professional services. Feel welcome to contact me at thomas@poppelgaard.com if you are interested in using my professional services and you need help with GPU solutions.
You will see more upcoming blogs from me covering this topic. End User experience, assessments of GPU workload, scaling/sizing, benchmarking, hardware supported, GPU side by side experience, Hypervisor vs Bare metal with a GPU. Watch out for cool things….
I am next week doing a free live Webinar with fellow CTP, Trond Eirik Håvarstein from XenAppBlog.com, 11th February 2014. (time 14:00 EST (GMT-5))
This is my favorite topic and I am travel to different parts of the World taking about this subject both at Citrix, NVIDIA GTC, Citrix User Groups, VMware User Groups, other Partner Events, now this is your chance to see my webinar free and live at XenAppBlog.
FYI – there is limited seats so hurry up and sign on here https://xenapptraining.leadpages.net/gpu-in-virtualization-learn-why-its-important/
My topic is “GPU in virtualization, learn why it’s important”
Evolution of Virtualized Graphics (Citrix vs VMware)
Business drivers for virtualizing applications that requires GPU
User Experience – VDI with a GPU vs Shared Desktop with a GPU
NVIDIA GRID vGPU, Buzz, How to use it, Sizing, Limitations – Q&A
