Here is an article on how to associate multiple GRID engines with a single XenApp instance: http://xenserver.org/blog.html?view=entry&id=93. This was tested with a K2. Note that this is not officially supported by Citrix or NVIDIA at this time, but illustrates an interesting option of how to better leverage a single XenApp instance within the XenServer host environment.
Note: The article was updated on 2015-May-20 with much better images so you can see the frames in much greater detail.
Great article Tobias, I hope the XenServer team take this onboard and work to make it easier for everyone to provide multiple GPU’s into VM’s
good evening Tobias
just to clarify, we just ordered two new hp dl380 with Nvidia K2 cards inside.
we have xd7.6 environment for your own company IT in finace (byod). At the moment running on vshpere 5.5 and PVS 7.6. most of our users working on a 2008 r2 desktop, at the moment max 8 persons per server. performance is not kind of high. we have user with multiple ica in ica and rdp in ica sessions, office 2013 and the webbrowser.
plan know, is to change hypervisor to xen 6.5 sp1, with nvidia k2 card and vppu.
there ar tons of documents with vgpu and vdi’s, but i cannot find something good with vgpu and xd7.6 and server-sessions? can you confirm that this should work out?
end solution looks like, 4 hp host each with 6 server vm’s and on each vm 12 users.
there are a view vdi’s, but no need to give them powerfull grafic.
thx in advance and remain with best regards.
Thorsten
Hi, Thorsten:
The setup described above (and in detail at the link) currently runs on a Dell R720 with XenServer 6.5 SP1 and XenApp 7.6. Our conclusion for our purposes was that we were better off just pushing everything through GPU passthrough mode. Our XenApp server is Windows 2012 R2, which makes a huge difference vs. Win 2008. It resides on the same physical server hosting XenServer. Clients are a mix of all sorts of things, but the main thing is to have adequate horsepower on your server side.
The R720 is no longer available, but it’s replacement, the R730, is even better. I can’t see why your DL380 shouldn’t work well, also. If you want to save on Windows licensing costs, doubling up the GPU engines should certainly help. I’d be interested if a quad configuration would work (I have a K1 and a K2 in the same server, so cannot of course combine those).
Note that starting with XenServer 6.5 you can now only run GPU passthrough with the free license (vGPU support requires licensing), but you can still try this out in passthrough mode for free.
Regards,