GRID K1 Performance on 2012 R2 Hyper-V w/ RemoteFX

We would like to have a virtualized environment that will support Revit. Currently we are testing with a GRID K1 card on a Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V using RemoteFX. The guest VMs are Windows 8.1 Enterprise and have been given 16 GB or RAM and 4 CPU. We are connecting to these VMs using W8.1 enterprise as well. We are currently using driver version 9.18.13.4066 for the K1 card.

We do not see greatly increased GPU performance using the K1 over standard on-board graphics from the server (HP DL380p G8). We can verify that we are using RemoteFX and the K1 card yet we are not getting desired performance. Are there tools and metrics to determine if we are getting the proper and expected performance from the K1 card?

Also as we deploy additional VMs using Hyper-V/RemoteFX, is there additional configuration needed to ensure that Hyper-V will use all 4 GPUs on the K1 card? The “Hyper-V Settings” menu, under Physical GPU, makes you select 1 of the 4 GPU to use for RemoteFX. How do we ensure that we will use all 4 when the time comes?

I would claim a lot depends on the graphics format. For example, I do not think RemoteFX can handle certain versions of openGL.

Have you been running the nvidia-smi utility on the Windows server itself?

Access to the GPU for the VM’s is handled by the RemoteFX virtual adapter in this scenario.

You don’t give an indication of how much Video Memory you’ve allocated.

Performance / load tends to be managed based on the video ram allocated.

As for using all the GPU’s on a K1, from what I’ve seen, Hyper-V will use one GPU until all that RAM is consumed and then move the next VM to start to a new GPU.

Take a look at the article below that explains how VRAM is dynamically allocated in RemoteFX

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rds/archive/2013/12/04/remotefx-vgpu-improvements-in-windows-server-2012-r2.aspx

This is a feature of Hyper-V and not the GRID technology. In Hyper-V there is no way to control which VM uses which GPU, for that you require a different Hypervisor.

Also, REVIT is known to be very CPU intensive and only uses the GPU for specific tasks e.g. rendering.

Since it’s a DirectX application you’ll avoid the lack of OpenGL support under RemoteFX, but it is something to be aware of for other applications in your portfolio.