A40 with ESXi 7

I have two dell R740 hosts using Tesla P40 for horizon VDIs
a third host we bought came with an A40
In Vcenter it is only shown as GA100GL [A30 PCIe]
I tried different versions of the drivers like NVIDIA_bootbank_NVIDIA-VMware_ESXi_7.0.2_Driver_510.47.03-1OEM.702.0.0.17630552.vib
but I never got to a point where it even shows up in nvidia-smi
→ NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn’t communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running.

I have enabled “SR-IOV Global Enable” in bios
I have set graphic settings to shared direct via vcenter

I am not even sure if the card is supported the way I want it to work (we have a couple of windows 10 VDIs that I would like to be able to move to all 3 hosts

what else could I do?

Hi,
please check with Dell first if you really got a A40. It sounds you got a A30 which is only usable for Compute (Linux only).
Also check with lspci | grep NVIDIA which hardware is present.

Best regards
Simon

of course you are correct! sorry! it is an A30!
when you say it is only usable for computation is that a temporary situation or will it never be usable as vGPU?

and one more question: if our supplier would give us an A40 instead how good/bad could this work with the migration of VMs between the hosts with tesla P40 and the one with A40
would it be a better choice to get the older P40 again (assuming it would not cost less because they will not refund money)

Hi,
A30 won’t ever support Windows. A40 does but you still won’t be able to use migration between P40 and A40. Migration only works between identical GPUs.
Our documentation says:

  • Live migration between servers with different GPUs is not supported. In order for live migration to be successful, exactly the same profile needs to be available on the target host.

In your case I would indeed try to get a P40 to mitigate all the issues you will face with mixing GPUs

thank you!