I’m trying to install/configure an 7.6 XenApp server with 2 x Grid K1.
I got some trouble with the driver configuration and i think I might be wrong in my setup somewhere…
Hardware stuff : HP ProLiant DL380 w 2xGrid K1 + W2k12 R2 as OS
My main concern is about the Nvidia Control Panel who seem to be incomplete. I don’t get the 3D setting, Display and video option. Also, in my device manager, i see 4 Grid K1 card per card.
Does someone have already experience somthing like this?
Thanks,
Steve Vanasse
NB : All the citrix XenApp stuff part sound good except for graphic
I haven’t had a lot of personal experience on bare metal so am hunting for some best practice on physical info - it may well be slightly different to on a hypervisors, as to what you can see.
The GPUs on a K1 (4 GPUs per board) are only equivalent to a K600 GPU so sharing one of those gives each XenApp very little GPU (as detailed in my blog). What applcations are you looking to accelerate and why the K1 choice with XenApp. A K2 would normally be a far more suitable starting point for most users using XEnApp GPU-sharing (each K2 has 2 x K5000 like GPUs), you’d 2 server OS XenApp VMs to each NVIDIA board (one to each physical GPU on the board).
Unfortunately the Experimental MultiGPU feature is no longer supported in XenApp, you can see the article below.
Because of this, I would not advise spending any further effort on attempting to get this working. What I would suggest is deploying XenServer on the host and using that to deliver 8 VM’s each with a K1 GPU in passthrough.
My answer was muddled - I didn’t really understand what you were trying to do - JAson has cleared up… all this was about XenApp on a hypervisor:
"I would like to step back though as when I was at Citrix we used to generally recommend at least a K5000 on pass-through Citrix supports NVIDIA GRID™ vGPU™ for XenApp! | Citrix Blogs
The GPUs on a K1 (4 GPUs per board) are only equivalent to a K600 GPU so sharing one of those gives each XenApp very little GPU (as detailed in my blog). What applcations are you looking to accelerate and why the K1 choice with XenApp. A K2 would normally be a far more suitable starting point for most users using XEnApp GPU-sharing (each K2 has 2 x K5000 like GPUs), you’d 2 server OS XenApp VMs to each NVIDIA board (one to each physical GPU on the board)."
But as JAson said if you did add a hypervisor - the K1 is way below the spec recommended normally for sharing and you’d probably want VDI to give each user one of those K600s on the K1…
The experimental support for multiple GPUs in HDX/XA removed was caused by fundamental changes by Microsoft in the server OS that mean currently multiple GPUs can’t be enumerated or used in the Windows 2012 R2.
My Proof of concept is in fact an plan B to run GoogleEarth from XenApp 7.6.
We are an utility company who only add some layers over the global globe. Not a too complicate task but it might become CPU intensive when all layers are active.
QUestion : Going with VMware or XenServer as an hypervisor? Pro and Con? We already have extra VMware licence. I might think that XenServer is prefer (white paper) but does it worth the price?
As far as I know XenApp/XenDesktop customers will have entitlement to XenServer for free so it’s an option. If you have vSphere for free too it sounds like it’s your choice. I believe the montioring/management options may be a bit different. XenServer have a GPU discussion forum with some XenApp users where you can ask questions GPU Technologies - Discussions