At my workplace, we are exploring offering our VDI labs some GPU support. As my co-worker and I start looking over the differences between the K1 & K2 (Grid 1.0??) and Tesla (GRID 2.0), there are some substantial differences.
So you are telling me now with GRID 2.0, I have to purchase the hardware (Tesla M60. M6) and the software licensing to use GPU ? If that assumption is correct, the TCO for the GRID 2.0 is 30% more all because of the licensing costs. When we both compared the K1 & K2, we didn’t have to worry about licensing model but when it comes to the GRID 2.0, we have to license our users on a concurrent usage model and yearly support ? is their a discount available for educational institutions ? When we add the numbers up, it doesn’t make sense for any GPU in a VDI with the licensing model NVIDIA has in place. Am I misunderstanding something ?
Yes, the introduction of the licensing model is not the most popular thing to have been done, I don’t think anyone will deny that, especially as the physical GPUs are also more expensive than their predecessors. You’re right though, there are substantial differences between an M60 and a K2. For starters, one was built on a Quadro board, the other is a Tesla. Then there’s the rather large increase in session density and performance. You can do (a lot) more, with less physical resource, which is what we’re all trying to do, right?
If you want to maximise your M60 investment, obviously subject to use case, rather than pure VDI, look to use RDS / XenApp. Much better density and overall hardware utilisation.
Regarding discounts for EDU, please speak to a GRID reseller for the most up to date information ;-)
Just a bit of personal advice … I would strongly recommend you do not purchase K1 / K2 GPUs at this stage, future driver development will be limited and you will run in to Hypervisor version limitations. XenServer 7.1 and vSphere 6.5 are the last Hypervisor versions to support K1 / K2 GPUs … If you purchase these now, unless they’re for R&D or some sort of Dev, you’ll be throwing your money away.