I represent a school in Australia, we are looking to put in some GPU power for our Citrix environment. The aim is to migrate our Adobe Creative Suite and more GPU intensive lessons to Citrix. Our GPU workloads are quite light and just some moderate acceleration (we currently have NVS 290 and 300 cards in desktops) would be adequate.
We currently run:
Xenserver 6.2 hosts
Xendesktop 7.1
PVS 6.1
Server 2012 R2 VM
We use a Xenapp hosted shared desktop model
We would be looking at allocating vGPUs to Xenapp hosts and having users share the GPU
Currently I am looking at putting in 2 physical hosts, each with 1 Grid card
The option that looks best to me at the moment is the Grid K2, and allocating K260Q vGPU to 4 VM per physical host. This will give me a total of 8 VM that could support around 60 light graphics users.
We would like to try to avoid dedicated Xendesktop style VM
Could anyone give me feedback on my idea and any other suggestions?
Why not consider instead serving your apps from a XenApp instance running on a server under XenServer and tapping into a GRID with GPU passthrough? You’ll probably get overall somewhat better performance, in other words, the efficiency may be slightly better via passthrough mode than by assigning a vGPU to your XenApp instnace. It’d be easy enough to test. I’d also check if 4 VCPUs wil be enough, depending on your load, and that you have adequate memory allocated. You can always create a second XenApp server instance with the other half of the K2, if you need more power, and just have a XenApp farm to tap into so things get distributed fairly evenly.
I’ve done all the appropriate testing with LoginVSI to size my environment, I am confident with the physical to VM configuration, however I have no experience with GPU in Citrix.
I will do some benchmark eval with GPU pass-through vs slicing the GPU up to see the most effective method for our environment.
@pro
These are great questions. And it looks like you have done all the right homework on GRID w Citrix.
I am the Solutions Architect who looks after Aus/NZ.
Will send you a PM to get you some test GRID boards. There’s no better way to tell between K1 vs K2 than just giving them both a go!