Citrix have released a new version of Citrix XenDesktop 7.11 and XenApp 7.11 and is now available for download.
Citrix raises the bar of for user experience and new product release of following technologies
Virtual Delivery Agents 7.11 for ServerOS and ClientOS
AppDNA 7.11
Storefront 3.7
Provisioning Services 7.11
Profile Management 5.5
License Server 11.14
Citrix Receiver 15.0 for Windows
HDX RealTime Optimization Pack 2.1.1 for Microsoft Skype® for Busines
Citrix SCOM Management Bundle for XenApp and XenDesktop (2016_08_24)
Linux Virtual Delivery Agent 1.4
Tech preview for HTML5 redirection
This release is an important release no matter if you are working daily with Office application such as Excel, Word or Browsers and even highend applications such as CAD. The features in 7.11 have important improved user experience from the VDA to the Receiver that improves dramtically the user experience. NVIDIA NVENC technology is now part of VDA and supports even multiple monitors. The admin can now monitor RTT within Director this feature have been something I have asked for very long time and now finally its in the product, customer will love this new feature so its fast to see where the issue is in a infrastructure with which users that have latency issues. Version 7.11 is the release that fully supports Microsoft Windows Server 2016 that is soon GA, this means you can install Delivery components on Windows Server 2016, VDA on Server 2016, use Azure N-series with support for Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V Discrete Device Assignment (DDA) or you can use it onpremises with Hyper-V. Support for UWP is HUGE and I am very excited about this technology and this also used in Microsoft Hololens so cant wait to a Receiver for hololens so you can publish UWP apps to Hololens 😉 Imagine that. I can keep going on with all these new features lets dig in below and learn whats new, its incredible that Citrix raises the bar and comes with huge improvements and they this each 3 months 🙂 yes each 3months, you read it correct. If you dont have a plan for this in your company I highly recommend you build a strategy on how you upgrade you Citrix environment frequently to get these awesome new features.
Earlier this year I have seen several customers having issues with AutoCAD in Citrix not defaulting to the primary display adapter, so the GPU wouldn be fully functioning and Autodesk AutoCAD 2016/2017 would turn off hardware acceleration. This issue have been seen on NVIDIA Gpus such as GRID, NVIDIA also have a official KB on this http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4092/ and issue is also seen with INTEL gpu such as Iris Pro Graphics more specific on solutions with HPE Moonshot 710p and 710x.
Issue is identified on both Citrix XenApp 7.x (Windows Server OSs) and Citrix XenDesktop 7.x (Workstation OSs)
“The primary display adapter is not shown as the default in a Citrix environment.”
I am happy to share that Autodesk have finally fixed this “bug” with Citrix and now the GPUs will work correctly with Autodesk AutoCAD 2016 and Autodesk AutoCAD 2017 when you apply below hot fix for the product you have.
Accumulated hotfix 4 for AutoCAD 2016 based applies to:
This hotfix for citrix applies to the following releases with the AutoCAD 2016 Service Pack 1 already installed:
Autodesk AutoCAD 2016
Autodesk AutoCAD Architecture 2016
Autodesk AutoCAD Civil 3D 2016
Autodesk AutoCAD Electrical 2016
Autodesk AutoCAD Map 3D 2016
Autodesk AutoCAD Mechanical 2016
Autodesk AutoCAD MEP 2016
Autodesk AutoCAD P&ID 2016
Autodesk AutoCAD Plant 3D 2016
Autodesk AutoCAD Utility Design 2016
Issues Resolved by This Hotfix for citrix
There is a security vulnerability with ATIL image files within a drawing.
The primary display adapter is not shown as the default in a Citrix environment.
Opening an Excel hyperlink resizes the AutoCAD application window to match the Excel sheet size.
Locked objects can be edited by Matchprop command.
Publish borders are cut off with certain sheet sizes.
Background masks are not ignoring the Xrefoverride setting.
Can crash when panning transparently in multiple viewports.
Performance problem opening files containing specific objects in AutoCAD 2016 may appear as if files cannot be opened.
Use of the LISP (command) function within the (mapcar) function results in VVC Internal Error.
Grip stretch doesn’t work correctly when DYNMODE equals value other than 2 or 3.
acedCallBackOnCancel is not detected for Lispcallable Functions.
Certain VBA Macros throw an execution error.
DWG file fails to insert into another DWG file.
Can crash when Copy/Paste a block by Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V.
Can crash when opening AutoCAD in Windows 10.
AcSettingSync.exe launched when running OPTIONS command.
Annotations in Architectural units format are changing to Decimal format.
Accumulated hotfix 4 for AutoCAD LT 2016 applies to:
this hotfix for citrix applies to the following release:
Autodesk AutoCAD LT 2016 with the AutoCAD LT Service Pack 1 already installed
Issues Resolved by This Hotfix for citrix
There is a security vulnerability with ATIL image files within a drawing.
The primary display adapter is not shown as the default in a Citrix environment.
Opening an Excel hyperlink resizes the AutoCAD LT application window to match the Excel sheet size.
Locked objects can be edited by Matchprop command.
Publish borders are cut off with certain sheet sizes.
Background masks are not ignoring the Xrefoverride setting.
May crash when panning transparently in multiple viewports.
Performance problem opening files containing specific objects in AutoCAD LT 2016 may appear as if files cannot be opened.
Grip stretch doesn’t work correctly when DYNMODE equals value other than 2 or 3.
DWG file fails to insert into another DWG file.
Can crash when Copy/Paste a block by Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V.
Can crash when opening AutoCAD LT in Windows 10.
AcSettingSync.exe launched when running OPTIONS command.
Annotations in Architectural units format are changing to Decimal format.
Who Should Install This Service Pack for AutoCAD 2017?
Apply this Service Pack to the following Autodesk products running on all supported operating systems and languages. Be sure to install the correct Service Pack.
This Service Pack can be applied to AutoCAD 2017 installed as a standalone application, AutoCAD-based Vertical products, and the Autodesk Design Suites listed below.
AutoCAD and Verticals Products:
AutoCAD 2017
AutoCAD LT 2017
AutoCAD Architecture 2017
AutoCAD Civil 3D 2017
AutoCAD Electrical 2017
AutoCAD Map 3D 2017
AutoCAD Mechanical 2017
AutoCAD MEP 2017
AutoCAD P&ID 2017
AutoCAD Plant 3D 2017
AutoCAD Utility Design 2017
Autodesk Design Suites:
Autodesk AutoCAD Design Suite 2017
Autodesk AutoCAD Inventor LT Suite 2017
Autodesk AutoCAD Revit LT Suite 2017
Autodesk AutoCAD with Advance Steel 2017
Autodesk Building Design Suite 2017
Autodesk Factory Design Suite 2017
Autodesk Infrastructure Design Suite 2017
Autodesk Plant Design Suite 2017
Autodesk Product Design Suite 2017
Autodesk Revit Collaboration Suite 2017
Issues Resolved by This Service Pack
Display
Xrefs on a frozen viewport layer would still be plotted
AutoCAD in Citrix might not default to the primary display adapter.
Open and Save
Opening a drawing file using an Excel hyperlink was repositioning the AutoCAD application window.
PDF Import
Importing a PDF Underlay that was attached with relative path could fail.
Xref
The Xref status incorrectly displays the “Needs reloading” message when the dataset is opened from a UNC path to a shared folder.
General
When opening drawings created with AutoCAD Architecture, AutoCAD might crash if the drawing was saved again.
Plotting with certain visual styles might produce incorrect results.
Its time to update your NVIDIA GRID K1, K2, M6, M60 environment.
NVIDIA have released new drivers that supports Windows 10 + fix several bugs.
If you want to test Server 2016 then the new Windows 10 drivers works, I have just tried and they work but they are not “certified” so test this with your own risk, please. Always test this in a test environment and this is not for production environments, unless you want to be early innovators 😉
#HINT – Windows 10 is not supported on Citrix XenServer 6.2 only on Citrix XenServer 6.5.
## HINT – Linux drivers are only available with Tesla M6, M60.
Whats new in vGPU 352.83-354.80
NVIDIA have released a new version of vGPU 352.83-354.80 for NVIDIA GRID 1.0 (K1, K2) GRID 2.0 Tesla M6 and Tesla M60 platform.
NVIDIA GRID Virtual GPU Manager versions 352.83 for Citrix XenServer 6.2 SP1 with hotfixes XS62ESP1009 and XS62ESP1011
NVIDIA GRID Virtual GPU Manager version 352.83 for VMware vSphere 6.0 Hypervisor (ESXi)
NVIDIA Windows drivers for vGPU version 354.80
NVIDIA Linux drivers for vGPU version 352.83.
Important:
The GRID vGPU Manager and Windows guest VM drivers must be installed together. Older VM drivers will not function correctly with this release of GRID vGPU Manager. Similarly, older GRID vGPU Managers will not function correctly with this release of Windows guest drivers
Update existing vGPU GRID Manager (Hypervisor)
GRID vGPU Manager 352.83 upgrade for Citrix XenServer 6.2
If you have a NVIDIA GRID K1, K2 vGPU GRID manager installed in Citrix XenServer. Upgrade with below methodology:
Methodology 1 – the manual way “No GUI”
Upgrading an existing installation of the NVIDIA driver on Citrix XenServer 6.2, use the rpm -U command to upgrade:
If you have NVIDIA GRID K1 / K2
[root@localhost ~]# rpm -Uv NVIDIA-vGPU-kepler-xenserver-6.2-352.83.i386.rpm
Preparing packages for installation...
If you have NVIDIA GRID TESLA M6 / M60
[root@localhost ~]# rpm -Uv NVIDIA-vGPU-xenserver-6.2-352.83.i386.rpm
Preparing packages for installation...
The recommendation from NVIDIA is to shutdown all VMs using a GPU. The machine does continue to work during the update, but since you need to reboot the XenServer itself, it’s better to gracefully shutdown the VMs. So after your VMs have been shutdown and you upgraded the NVIDIA driver, you can reboot your host.
Verify that the NVIDIA kernel driver can successfully communicate with the GRID physical GPUs in your system by running the nvidia-smi command, which should produce a listing of the GPUs in your platform:
Check driver version is 352.83, if it is then your host is ready for GPU awesomeness and make your VM rock.
GRID vGPU Manager 352.83 for Citrix XenServer 6.5
If you have a NVIDIA GRID K1, K2, M6, M60 vGPU GRID manager installed in Citrix XenServer. Upgrade with one of below methodology:
Methodology 1 – the manual way “No GUI”
Upgrading an existing installation of the NVIDIA driver on Citrix XenServer 6.5, use the rpm -U command to upgrade:
If you have NVIDIA GRID K1 / K2
[root@localhost ~]# rpm -Uv NVIDIA-vGPU-kepler-xenserver-6.5-352.83.x86_64.rpm
Preparing packages for installation...
If you have NVIDIA GRID TESLA M6 / M60
[root@localhost ~]# rpm -Uv NVIDIA-vGPU-xenserver-6.5-352.83.x86_64.rpm
Preparing packages for installation...
The recommendation from NVIDIA is to shutdown all VMs using a GPU. The machine does continue to work during the update, but since you need to reboot the XenServer itself, it’s better to gracefully shutdown the VMs. So after your VMs have been shutdown and you upgraded the NVIDIA driver, you can reboot your host.
Select Install Update… from the Tools menu
Click Next after going through the instructions on the Before You Start section
Click Add on the Select Update section and open NVIDIA’s XenServer Supplemental Pack ISO
If you have NVIDIA GRID K1 / K2 select following file:
Click Next on the Select Update section
In the Select Servers section select all the XenServer hosts on which the Supplemental Pack should be installed on and click Next
Click Next on the Upload section once the Supplemental Pack has been uploaded to all the XenServer hosts
Getting Started
Click Next on the Prechecks section
Click Install Update on the Update Mode section
Click Finish on the Install Update section
After the XenServer platform has rebooted, verify that the GRID package installed and loaded correctly by checking for the NVIDIA kernel driver in the list of kernel loaded modules.
Validate from putty or XenCenter CLI
run lsmod | grep nvidia
Verify that the NVIDIA kernel driver can successfully communicate with the GRID physical GPUs in your system by running the nvidia-smi command, which should produce a listing of the GPUs in your platform:
Check driver version is 352.83, if it is then your host is ready for GPU awesomeness and make your VM rock.
GRID vGPU Manager 352.83 for VMware vSphere 6.x
To update the NVIDIA GPU VIB, you must uninstall the currently installed VIB and install the new VIB.
To uninstall the currently installed VIB:
Stop all virtual machines using 3D acceleration.
Place the ESXi host into Maintenance mode.
Open a command prompt on the ESXi host.
Stop the xorg service by running the command:/etc/init.d/xorg stop
Remove the NVIDIA VMkernel driver by running the command:vmkload_mod -u nvidia
Identify the NVIDIA VIB name by running this command:esxcli software vib list | grep NVIDIA
Remove the VIB by running the command:esxcli software vib remove -n nameofNVIDIAVIBYou can now install a new NVIDIA GPU VIB
Use the esxcli command to install the vGPU Manager package:
If you have NVIDIA GRID K1 / K2 select following file:
After the ESXi host has rebooted, verify that the GRID package installed and loaded correctly by checking for the NVIDIA kernel driver in the list of kernel loaded modules.
Verify that the NVIDIA kernel driver can successfully communicate with the GRID physical GPUs in your system by running the nvidia-smi command, which should produce a listing of the GPUs in your platform:
Check driver version is 352.83, if it is then your host is ready for GPU awesomeness and make your VM rock.
Update existing vGPU Driver (Virtual Machine)
When the hypervisor vGPU GRID manager is updated next is updating the Virtual Machines vGPU.
Update your Golden Images and reprovisioning the new virtual machines with updated vGPU drivers, if you have stateless machines update vGPU drivers on each.
#HINT – Express upgrade of drivers is the recommended option according to the setup. If you use the “Custom” option, you will have the option to do a “clean” installation. The downside of the “clean installation” is that it will remove all profiles and custom settings. The pro of using the clean installation option is that it will reinstall the complete driver, meaning that there will be no old driver files left on the system. I most of the time recommends using a “Clean” installation to keep it vanilla 🙂
New driver functionality with 354.80
354.80_grid_win8_win7_64bit_international.exe
354.80_grid_win8_win7_international.exe
354.80_grid_win10_64bit_international.exe
354.80_grid_win10_international.exe
NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-352.83-grid.run
#1 Linux driver is not available with Citrix XenServer 6.2 or 6.5 and ESX for K1/K2. This is only available with GRID vGPU for M60
Linux support in only available with GRID Tesla M6 / M60
GRID vGPU with Linux guest VMs is supported on Tesla M60 and M6, with the following distributions:
vGPU 352.83-354.80 for XenServer 6.2 for Tesla M6 / M60
vGPU 352.83-354.80 for XenServer 6.5 for Tesla M6 / M60
vGPU 352.83-354.80 for vSphere 6 for Tesla M6 / M60
For more information about the update from NVIDIA GRID – vGPU 352.83-354.80 contact me.
Citrix technology professional – CTP, and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional MVP, Thomas Poppelgaard provides professional services. Write to me on my email thomas@poppelgaard.com or call on my cell +45 53540356
I want to share this with you all, Luke Wignall and his team from NVIDIA have created some great AppGuides, that helps with understanding how many users can you put on a NVIDIA GRID system with either K1/K2 in a VMware environment. These guides are made together with vendors such as Autodesk. The guides focus on following apps Autodesk Revit.
In this blogpost my goal is to highlight the great work NVIDIA have done creating the scalability app guides and these guides helps you if you want to virtualize Autodesk Revit with NVIDIA GRID and VMware Horizon. The guides are great – cause they give an idea what you would require in a virtualized environment and these can be reused for other virtualized platforms such as Citrix and Microsoft – keep in mind that results might be different. If you would like to get more informations about how the setup is configured and which methodology i recommend you read the AppGuide, you can download it in under source in the end of this article.
The appguides gives a great idea to understand the impact of CPU and how the GPU are giving value.
About Autodesk Revit 2015
Autodesk Revit is Building Information Modeling (BIM) software with features for architectural design, MEP and structural engineering, and construction. Revit requires a GPU as you rotate, zoom, and interact with drawings. It also creates heavy CPU load as it manages all the elements of a drawing via a database, which means we need high performance storage as well. The heaviest Revit CPU usage occurs during data-rich operations like file open/save and model updates. As a result both CPU and GPU need to be considered in architecting your vGPU solution. The size of your drawing file, the concurrency of your users, and the level of interaction with 3D data need to be factored into defining your user groups.
Results Appguide for Autodesk Revit 2015
The following are results of our testing, looking for the greatest scalability while still within performance expectations. Its important to note that your users, your data, and your hardware, will impact these results and you may decide a different level of performance or scalability is required to meet your individual business needs. As the RFO Benchmark does not currently exercise some of Revit’s newest GPU capabilities, and was built to push the limits of dedicated hardware versus the shared resources of VDI, the decision was made to stop testing once the host’s CPU was approaching 100% utilized and test times had climbed past twice what we were finding on the a single physical workstation with dedicated resources. We then met with the Autodesk Revit team, discussed the results, reviewed the tests in action, and determined with eyes on that this was still within what a typical user would deem acceptable and usable. It’s been well documented that storage performance is key to providing high performance graphics workloads, especially with many users and ever-growing file or model sizes.
FYI – Lower scores are better, representing less time to perform the activity in below tables.
Here are the results when we push for more scalability, bringing the maximum number of VDI guests to 20 and 24. We have added a 15 second staggered start to emulate synthetic human behavior.
Revit 2015 users per server
Based on our findings, NVIDIA GRID provides the following performance and scalability metrics for Autodesk Revit 2015; using the lab equipment shown below, using the RFO benchmark, and in working with Autodesk and their emphasis on usability. Of course, your usage will depend on your models but this is guidance to help guide your implementation.
I want to share this with you all, Luke Wignall and his team from NVIDIA have created some great AppGuides, that helps with understanding how many users can you put on a NVIDIA GRID system with either K1/K2 in a VMware environment. These guides are made together with vendors such as Autodesk. The guides focus on following apps Autodesk AutoCAD.
In this blogpost my goal is to highlight the great work NVIDIA have done creating the scalability app guides and these guides helps you if you want to virtualize Autodesk AutoCAD 2015 with NVIDIA GRID and VMware Horizon. The guides are great – cause they give an idea what you would require in a virtualized environment and these can be reused for other virtualized platforms such as Citrix and Microsoft – keep in mind that results might be different. If you would like to get more informations about how the setup is configured and which methodology i recommend you read the AppGuide, you can download it in under source in the end of this article.
The appguides gives a great idea to understand the impact of CPU and how the GPU are giving value.
About AutoCAD 2015
Autodesk AutoCAD is one of the most globally used software platforms for CAD design and documentation. AutoCAD leverages both CPU and GPU to deliver a high quality user experience, and as a result, there are several things that need to be considered in architecting your GRID vGPU solution: the size of your map data, the concurrency of your users, and the level of interaction with primary 2D and some 3D data.
Results NVIDIA Appguide for Autodesk AutoCAD 2015
The following are results of our testing, looking for the greatest scalability while still within performance expectations. It’s important to note that your users, your data, and your hardware will impact these results, and you may decide a different level of performance or scalability is required to meet your individual business needs. As the Catalyst benchmark does not push AutoCAD’s GPU capabilities, and was built to push the limits of dedicated hardware versus the shared resources of VDI, the decision was made to stop testing once the CPU was approaching 100% utilized and test times had climbed past twice what we were finding on the a single physical workstation with dedicated resources. We then met with the Autodesk AutoCAD team, discussed the results, reviewed the tests in action, and physically verified that this was still within what a typical user would deem acceptable and usable. When running AutoCAD, anything higher than 20 FPS is awesome, but users generally don’t notice the difference once you exceed 30 FPS. However, once you drop below 10 FPS, the software is going to feel very sluggish and become unusable by the time you hit 5 FPS. • 20 fps above is good • Below 10fps – sluggish • 5 fps – unusable
32VM : K220Q perform better than K120Q but K120Q is still maintain avg 31FPS.
40VM : Due to vGPU configuration, need K120Q, avg FPS is 24 FPS
48VM : one you hit 40 VM running, avg FPS is dropping below 10 FPS.
AutoCAD requires significant CPU resources, so investing in higher CPU speeds and more cores will pay off on performance and scalability. For medium to large models, K240Q performance might be better for a real use scenario. Since your own situation is different, you must test with your own models to ensure the most accurate results. The chart below shows a comparison between two different sets of VDI guests, one using the K2 and its K220Q profile, the other a K1 and its similarly sized frame buffer profile, the K120Q:
Notice that as scale, the number of concurrent VM’s increases, there is an obvious drop in performance, and logs will show this is the CPU becoming 100% utilized. This is a “peak workload” test as all sessions are started in unison, we would expect humans to be more staggered in their workflow.
The next chart shows results when we add that synthetic human behavior, we delay the launching of each session by 5 seconds, this offsets the tests and prevents all tests hitting the same function and impacting the CPU in unison.
Notice that with delayed launching, or staggered starts, the performance remains high to a much greater scale of concurrent sessions.
Additional findings from this testing:
• vCPU – 2 vCPU are sufficient for this benchmark, however increasing model size and complexity will change this. • Virtual System Memory – 2 GB is sufficient for this benchmark, however increasing model size and complexity will change this. • K220Q/K120Q : both show capped FPS caused by frame rate limiting (FRL) • vGPU has 45 fps frame limiter for performance balancing across multiple VM
AutoCAD 2015 Users per server
Based on the NVIDIA GRID™ Performance Engineering Lab (GRID P.E.L.) findings, NVIDIA GRID provides the following performance and scalability metrics for Autodesk AutoCAD 2015. These metrics are based on tests with the lab equipment shown in the graphic below, using the Cadalyst benchmark, and in working with Autodesk and their emphasis on end user usability. Of course, your usage will depend on your models and equipment, so this Application Guide is intended to be used as a starting point for your implementation.
