Compute mode vs graphics

Virtual GPU Forums General Discussion
1

Hi,

I need some help to understand computemode.
Today we have a test system with Nvidia M60 card, and we have been running it in graphics mode, and added several different profiles to ESXi VM`s and that has been working well.

Now we have a customer wanting to test this system in Compute mode instead, so we have changed it with the switch mode command and thats seems ok. But what I now dont understand is, should we add profiles to the VMs or should they use regular VMware VGA card ? They are going to test some applications on CentOS, not quite sure what applications, but it uses Compute mode they said. The reason I am wondering about the profiles, is because I tried to boot one of the VMs after we changed ESXi host to compute mode, and they fail to boot with the error "Could not initialize plugin ‘/usr/lib64/vmware/plugin/libnvidia-vgx.so’ for vGPU"

Please explain what I am missing here, and the concept around compute mode.

Thanks for reply.

Regards
Andreas

2

Hi Andreas,

compute mode doesn’t support vGPU. You cannot use vGPU profiles in compute mode. In compute mode the board has a different BAR size as example. If you don’t want to run graphics and just need CUDA for compute with Passthrough (vDGA) then you’re fine.
On the other hand, Tesla M60 won’t support CUDA with vGPU profiles. So it really depends on the use case.

Regards

Simon