HPE Moonshot have been around for some time now, and I have been very lucky working together with HPE and testing their server cartridges that are compatible with Citrix solutions. Last year, at HPE Discover in London, I wrote an article about how Citrix internally are using HPE moonshot and which server cartridges were available at that time and how financial customers are benefiting from these solutions.
NVIDIA have released the next generation of GRID 2.0. GRID 2.0 is based on the Maxwell architecture and the GRID 1.0 (K1/K2) was based on the Kepler architecture. I have been working with the GRID 1.0 technology since 2012 and it have matured alot in its 2 years of history. When the K1/K2 was released they was first working with GPU pass-through and then vGPU got introduced and you could virtualize the GPUs and increase density, which people wanted. Citrix was with their hypervisor the first company that supported NVIDIA GRID 1.0 and they was also the first company integrating vGPU into their Citrix Studio, so companies could easier provisioning machines with either MCS technology or PVS technology. VMware supported GRID 1.0 vGPU technology in 2015 in their hypervisor VMware vSphere 6.0 and fully integrated with their EUC stack VMware View, so companies can fully provisioning machines. The great thing about GRID 2.0 is that there is no need for a conversation when to choose either a K1 or a K2, if you required GPU compute or GPU framebuffer, M60 are being added to the tope end of the range and bringing 2x the performance, and if you have bladeserver’s, you can add the powerfull vGPU technology into the bladeserver’s with the M6.
Please notice that M6 will 0nly be supporting newer architecture of vendors not old platforms.
Maxwell architecture is the new architecture of GPUs and a powerful GPU you might know is the Titan X
In GRID 2.0 NVIDIA now have a GPU for blade servers a MXM single socket, High-end GPU called M6
In GRID 2.0 NVIDIA replaces K1/K2 with the new PCIe 3.0 Dual Socket, Dual High-end GPU called M60
The M60 delivers 4096 CUDA or compute and 16GB GDDR5 memory/framebuffer
The M60 has 6x the h.264 encoders of the K2, and also Maxwell supports 4:4:4 chroma sub sampling, which is great news for encoders.
Click the link to see which servers are certified for M60 and M6
http://www.nvidia.com/object/grid-certified-servers.html
M60 have following servers supported:
NVIDIA GRID 2.0 software is available in three editions that deliver accelerated virtual desktops to support the needs of your users. These editions include Virtual PC, Virtual Workstation, and Virtual Workstation Extended. GRID perpetual licenses are sold by Concurrent User (CCU).
NVIDIA GRID 2.0 (CCU) stands for ConCurrent User. So basically, per running VM as regardless of whether the user is connected to the VM or not, the VM is connected to the GPU and so consumes a license
NVIDIA GRID 2.0 software is much more than a “driver”. While the software package does include a guest driver for Windows and Linux, it also includes the NVIDIA GRID vGPU manager for VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer, as well as the license server and M6/M60 mode switching utility.
NVIDIA Tesla M6 and M60 profiles are specific to the M6 and M60. There will be similar profiles as to what NVIDIA had on K1 and K2 (512 MB through 4 GB), all with twice the number of users on M6/ M60 compared to K1/K2. Plus, there is an additional 8 GB profile on M6/M60 which also adds support for CUDA, which wasn’t available on K1/K2.
NVIDIA GRID 2.0 is Maxwell only. If you are an existing customer K1/K2 are unchanged and will remain as a parallel option.
GA of NVIDIA GRID 2.0 (M60 and M6) will be 15 September 2015.
To get NVIDIA GRID 2.0 if you are a Citrix customer you need:
Server hardware that supports NVIDIA GRID 2.0 +NVIDIA GPU M60 or M6 + NVIDIA vGPU Software license + Citrix XenDesktop or XenApp License (XenServer is included in XD/XA licenses)
To get NVIDIA GRID 2.0 if you are a VMware customer you need:
Server hardware that supports NVIDIA GRID 2.0 +NVIDIA GPU M60 or M6 + NVIDIA vGPU Software license + VMware Horizon license (Horizon includes vSphere for Desktop)
If you are a Citrix customer that wants to run on VMware vSphere you need:
Server hardware that supports NVIDIA GRID 2.0 + NVIDIA GPU M60 or M6 + NVIDIA vGPU Software license + Citrix XenDesktop or XenApp License + VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus license or vSphere for Desktop license
NVIDIA GRID YouTube Channel
NVIDIA GRID on LinkedIn
Follow NVIDIAGRID on Twitter
Citrix License FAQ regarding vGPU
Vmware License FAQ regarding vGPU
Hi all
I am very proud to be awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) by Microsoft.
This is my first award from Microsoft and I am now part of a fine bunch of geeks. Expect many great things coming from me around Microsoft 🙂
Thank you all for your support and believing in the values I do, I will make sure to bring lots of knowledge into the MVP program.
/Thomas Poppelgaard
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
Lakeside Case Study – sizing NVIDIA GRID vGPUHi all
I am very proud to share the results of the work I did with my friend and coworker Magnar Johnsen from FirstPoint. We have been developing for a long time a smart new way of analyzing data (iOPS, CPU, Memory, GPU, Latency..) and different pieces of software was evaluated and Lakeside Software was the product we decided to go with and both our companies Poppelgaard.com and Firstpoint who are a Lakeside partner so we are legit to make assessments for clients using Lakeside Software. Below article helps you if you are about to size a NVIDIA GRID vGPU solution using either Citrix XenServer or VMware vSphere. If you have been at NVIDIA GTC, Citrix Synergy, BriForum, E2EVC or seen me talking at a Citrix User Group you might have seen the results of the work we did, thats changing on how we think applications are impacting that requires a GPU.
Magnar and I have a long past with remote graphics and when we put our minds together we create something that is beautiful. Last year at Citrix Synergy audience could see how people could virtualize 3d remote graphics from Virtual Reality solution using Oculus Rift “Facebook” from the cloud. This was showed for the first time for audience and Citrix loved the idea and redesigned their exhibit about HDX 3D Pro next to FrameHawk, and sorry FrameHawk we stole all the attention with everybody wants to try the VR solution. The cool thing was VR was cool, but me and Magnar worked months “hard” to analyze the data we find at Aibel and we did very successful assessment and we shared the findings at Brian Madden BriForum in May 2014, just after Citrix Synergy, and the audience could for the first time learn the lessons we experienced and we could see applications behavior is not “just” what you might think or expect it to be. Analytics is the key to understand your app. Lets talk about why…
Aibel is an industrial pioneer with a history dating back more than a century. With around 5,500 employees worldwide the company is a leading supplier of engineering services related to oil, gas and renewable energy.
Aibel is a huge user of desktop virtualisation technology and is currently delivering virtual desktops to around 4,500 users. The challenge was to work out what to do with the remaining 1500 CAD/CAM workstations where graphics intensive modelling of 3D designs tied them to powerful physical workstations.
With projects occurring at the eight Aibel locations in Norway as well as at the Aibel offices in Thailand and Singapore the amount of data flowing across the WAN was increasing and becoming unwieldy. Large engineering models needed to be accessed on location and shared with engineers and designers in all Aibel office locations.
Virtualisation was seen as the solution to these issues but the challenge was how to virtualise graphics intensive workloads without impacting user experience or drive uneconomic datacentre specifications.
Firstpoint AS, a trusted Citrix Gold partner and virtualisation specialists, were brought in to advise Aibel on how to best virtualise this tricky user group.
They teamed up with Thomas Poppelgaard, an independent expert in virtualisation and GPU technologies and together they started an initial survey of Aibel’s situation.
It became quickly clear that the only way to successfully virtualise the 3D graphics workstations in an economically viable fashion was to deploy GPU acceleration technology in the datacentre. NVIDIA’s GRID cards would allow dedicated and shared GPU accelerators to be placed in the datacentre to be used by virtual desktops offloading server CPUs and removing user experience impact for other virtual desktop users.
Having identified the technology approach the challenge now was to work out how to size the workload of these 1500 users and design a solution that would deliver user experience at least as good as their current physical desktop experience. In order to do that the team needed to work out:
Using SysTrack the team has been able to build a complete inventory of the existing application and workstation estate and user behaviour. Using these analytics and SysTrack technologies a detailed specification and design for the future NVIDIA GRID based desktop virtualisation infrastructure has been created. Aibel is able to trust this design
as it is completely based on observed data captured from their existing estate and modelled using industry leading technologies from Lakeside and NVIDIA to create the optimal solution for Aibel’s situation. Key in any design is to not over provision the solution and thereby inflate the cost of the solution. On the other hand under provisioning will lead to a poor user experience and potential project failure. SysTrack ensures the right data is used to make the right decision for the future estate.
The assessment was primarily executed to understand Aibel engineers CAD applications such as Aveva PDMS, Bentley Microstation, etc. Shown below is a summary of average GPU usage for 1500 physical machines which revealed surprisingly that internet browsers are very GPU intensive compared to other applications.
Another benefit of leveraging SysTrack was the SysTrack MarketPlace report that had been co-authored by Lakeside and NVIDIA which allowed the team to convert all the data collected into accurate sizing of the number of NVIDIA GRID cards by model number required to offload the GPU workload.
The output from SysTrack also showed how GPUs were being used across the existing estate and how hard they were being utilised. Using jointly authored Lakeside/NVIDIA reports this data was then used to calculate estimated vGPU profiles.
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
This is my first blogpost about VMware EUC product and VMware is investing alot in end user computing space and making this GPU enabled.
In release 6.1.1 VMware have enabled GPU pass-through (vDGA) to Linux virtual machines that run on following OS (Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS, or NeoKylin) this technology can be used with NVIDIA GRID
This means with 1 physically NVIDIA GRID K1 you could have 4 linux VMs with GPU pass-through,k cause a K1 have 4 physically GPUs. With 1 physically NVIDIA GRID K2, you can have 2 linux VMs with GPU pass-through, cause a K2 have 2 physically GPUs
Below gives you an understand which GPU methodology I am talking about with what you can do with vDGA.
FYI – VMware View 6.1.1. supports NVIDIA GRID vGPU but only with Windows OS.
KUDUS goes to TeamRGE, for using their graphics.
VMware Horizon View 6.1.1 resolves known issues in previous releases and provides the following new features and enhancements:
VMware Horizon 6.1.1 release notes
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
