View 5.2 brings Hardware accelerated graphics for 3D and high performance graphical workloads. vSGA (Shared Accelerated Graphics) in View 5.2 will allow uses cases such as Adobe, CAD, CAM, HTML5 and will even give better user experience to Microsoft Office that is increasing using more 3D features.
vSGA will also help to increase user densities by allowing multiple VMs sharing single GPU. vSGA supports DirectX and OpenGL and doesn’t prevent the use of vMotion, HA or DRS. vSGA will allow you even to vMotion from a host with a supported physical GPU to host without a physical GPU. Desktops remain portable regardless of the Hardware.
There are two ways to configure your enviroment, either you can configure through vSphere or with the View Admin Console.
If you select Hardware from the drop down you can break break vMotion and have power-on issues. By selecting hardware you are makeing that a restriction. Also realize if you change the vRAM after the desktops have been created you will need to power off and power on the desktops for the setting to take effect.
Requirements for vSGA
| Component | Requirement |
| Host | PCIEx16 slot – Need to watch for power and space. These are cards are not small.Also make your sure the PSU can support the juice needed. NVIDA is the only game in town right now but other will follow suit |
| ESX | >ESX 5.1 HW ver 9 or higher Only available for Win 7 and Win8 Support for up to 8 GPUs per host |
| vCenter 5.1 | 5.1 or later |
| View Agent | 5.2 or later Support for up to 512 MB of VRAM per VM, minimum 64 MB is needed |
| View Client | Nothing specfic, 5.2 preferred, Tear2 Zero Client for the best performance |
As of this post, Supported Servers are:
SuperMicro SYS-1027GR
SuperMicro SYS-2027GR
Cisco C240 M3 with GPU kit
Dell R720 with GPU kit
HP WS460 with Graphics Expansion
HP DL 380
IBM DX360 M4
IBM X3650 M4
IBM Flexsystem
3D Tips for Making it Work
Turbo-charge View Video Performance – Registry changed on a windows VM will be needed to see the performance gains. UPDATE: View 5.2 Agent installer will take of this.
Make sure your BIOS sets the primary display to the integrated graphics device or low-end display. The display device for 3d graphics must be a secondary display.
You will need to install the NVIDA vib on every ESXi host.
Registry change on the VM – [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\VMware, Inc.\VMware SVGA DevTap]
“MaxAppFrameRate”=dword:00000000 – If it does not exist it defaults to 30. Set it to 0 to disable any frame cap.
Nice work
The super-charge setting you have linked is no longer needed in View 5.2 as this is set by the View Agent installer.
Also be careful with the MaxAppFrameRate as this can increase CPU and GPU usage and affect consolidation ratios.
Thanks Joel for the great feedback
Which videocards are supported for this? the new nvidia vgx cards or also other cards?
NVIDIA cards supported:
Quadro 4000, 5000, and 6000
Tesla M2070Q
GRID K1 and K2(coming)
Other vendors will be able to slot in
Does this also mean that vSphere will support GPU passthrough to XenDesktop with the certified hardware?
I don’t see why not. It can be fully configured without View.
How does one obtain the nVidia VIB? Is this available today from nVidia?
The VIB should be at both sites, the VIB was in the beta community. I would recommend following up with your NVIDA rep.
I’m being told that nVidia will post the VIB in a week or two.
Just cooming grid K2-K1 with diferent servers:ibm-asus are ready,…HP, dell o cisco is cooming soon…
View 5.2 Horizon + 2K2 + Teradici + Zero thin client.. yuhu!
Do you have any links to references for the supported hardware lists? We are interested in adding 3D graphics capabilities to our VDI environment. We had considered the Cisco C240-M3 but didn’t want to be limited by the form factor of the GPU. Do you have any information on the “GPU kit” mentioned?
I don’t have a list other than what I had posted. I know at Nutanix we building nodes with GPU cards. The great thing will be the admin won’t have to go through all of these steps.