Windows Server 2016 Archives

HPE Power’s the intelligent Edge at Citrix Synergy

At Citrix Synergy May 2019, HPE will show how dedicated graphics are delivered real-time by their HPE Edgeline solutions.

HPE have following solutions:

Trader Workstations
Engineering Workstations
Bare metal VDI – The Naked Truth

Trader Workstation -HPE Moonshot & CITRIX are bringing Mobility and Security to Traders & Developers in Financial Services without compromising on End User Experience.

Engineering Workstation – HPE Edgeline & CITRIX Cloud are bringing secure collaboration between engineering teams by enhancing systems and application performance and enable IOT & Industry 4.0 transition.

Bare metal VDI- Extending our success in POWER USERS to knowledge workers so that VDI does not need to be the lowest common denominator in terms of end user experience.

I have helped HPE design & build the Engineering Workstation. Last year at HPE Discover in Europe, November 2018, the solution of the Engineering Workstation powered by Citrix Cloud solution was announced how customers can now use dedicated graphics with either Intel or adding AMD WX4100 GPU or now here in May 2019 add a NVIDIA P1000 GPU. The solutions are incredible how you can get raw dedicated and garanteed performance without any performance overhead of a hypervisor or an operating system that see’s a virtual system. Bare metal is same UX as a workstation, basically HPE is taking the physically workstation at the desk to the edge and making it intelligent with a high user density. HPE is the only vendor who can deliver 4 bare metal VDIs in 1U, which makes them a market leader for Baremetal VDI use cases at the Edge. Customers can as well use Citrix Virtual Apps (RDSH) and increase density, which is popular in the financial industry.

Follow on social media how HPE and Citrix is taking innovation at the edge. #HPECitrix #CitrixSynergy

Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktop 7 1903 released

Citrix have released a new version of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop 7 1903 which is now available for download.

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

Microsoft Windows Server 2019 & Windows 10 1809 is supported with this release.

Another great thing is that now “infrastructure components for Citrix” can be installed on Microsoft Windows ServerCore, which means a minimum OS and only install what is required, no GUI just raw performance, something which a lot of service providers, customers are going to like. This is important for scalability and automation and having best TCO running a Citrix infrastructure. Citrix director & delivery controller now works and is supported on ServerCore (WS2012r2/WS2016/WS2019).

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

Director 1903
Virtual Delivery Agents 1903 for ServerOS and ClientOS
Virtual Delivery Agents 1903 for Desktop OS Core Services
Virtual Delivery Agent 1903 for Linux
Provisioning 1903
Storefront 1903
Session Recording 1903
App Layering 1903
Workspace App 1903 for Windows
Workspace App 1903 for Mac
Workspace App 1903 for Linux
Workspace App 1903 for Chrome
Workspace App 1903.1 for Android
Workspace App 1903 for iOS
Workspace App 1903 for Windows Store

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.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) now supports the NVIDIA GRID on Tesla P4 and P100

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) now supports the NVIDIA GRID on Tesla P4 and P100 for use with NVIDIA GRID (Virtual Workstation). The P4 and P100 is still BETA which means, this feature is not covered by any SLA or deprecation policy and might be subject to backward-incompatible changes from Google.

This is great for Service Providers, Partners, Customers that would like to use EUC vendor such as Microsoft, Citrix, VMware, Nutanix (Fra.me), Parallels, Mechdyne, PCoIP, and virtualize workloads that requires a GPU, which can be from a browser, office, CAD, CAM, CAE or video codec. Google Cloud Platform now have NVIDIA GRID available in their cloud offerings.