Can Omniverse be installed on an virtual machine?

Omniverse General Discussion
,
1

This might be a dumb question, but I am trying to install Isaac sim with omniverse on a ubuntu 18.04 in VMware workstation, with RTX 2070 windows 10 host, to use it with ROS.

However, I have found out that I cannot install an Nvidia driver in the virtual machine (for obvious reasons), and if I ran the isaac-sim.shdirectly, the following error will occur:

[0.528s] [ext: omni.kit.editor-0.1.0-full] startup
2021-01-13 00:19:02 [760ms] [Error] [carb.graphics-vulkan.plugin] VkResult: ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED
2021-01-13 00:19:02 [760ms] [Error] [carb.graphics-vulkan.plugin] vkEnumeratePhysicalDevices failed. No physical device is found.
2021-01-13 00:19:02 [760ms] [Error] [carb.graphics-vulkan.plugin] No physical device is found.
2021-01-13 00:19:02 [761ms] [Error] [gpu.foundation] carb::graphics::createInstance failed.
2021-01-13 00:19:02 [761ms] [Error] [omni.kit.plugin] createGpuFoundation() failed.
./isaac-sim.sh: line 4: 14125 Segmentation fault      (core dumped) "$SCRIPT_DIR/../../target-deps/kit_sdk_release/_build/linux-x86_64/release/omniverse-kit" --merge-config="$SCRIPT_DIR//experiences/isaac-sim.json" $@

Is this because I’m using a virtual machine instead of a physical graphics card? If so, is there any recommendations on how should I configure to run Omniverse?

Thanks!

1 Like
4

Yes, you can install on virtual machines but need to have RTX enabled GPU for graphics.
You can also install Nucleus on VM without a RTX GPU for collaboration

5

I’ll have someone help debug for you.

6

Thanks! So I guess there is no way or not practical for me to do any PCI passthrough to use the physical GPU since it is also needed by the host OS, and I think Nucleus is not practical either since I need to connect omniverse with Isaac sim and ROS. Is installing ubuntu on the physical machine my only option here?

7

Hi, you should be able to install the NVIDIA drivers on an Ubuntu VM once you have the GPU passthrough working.
Here’s a link to the NVIDIA drivers:

I am not sure if having Windows as the host OS might have any issues though. Is possible to use other host OS and run ROS on another Windows VM? I believe you should also be able to share a GPU between VMs but I would recommend a more powerful GPU than a 2070.

It is still recommended to run Isaac Sim on a bare-metal Ubuntu machine natively for authoring with the UI.

2 Likes