M2070-Q driver for ESXi 6.5

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1

As the title states is there drivers that will support this card for vSGA under ESXi 6.5? The card is listed as supported under 5.1 driver but not mentioned on later ones.

2

No, this is not a vGPU enabled board.

3

Thanks for the response but I’m asking about vSGA, not vGPU

4

So there’s no way to use my expensive tesla GPU under any ESXi later than 5.1?

I only want vSGA support.

5

The lack of any response is disappointing.

I’ve found I can use driver 319.65 on ESXi 5.5.
The card no longer seems to be supported by driver 340.32 - it detected it but trying to start the driver gave message along the lines "unable to determine the device handle for gpu".

I would still like to find some sort of driver support for ESXi 6.x

6

You’re requesting support for a board that has nothing to do with vGPU in the virtual GPU forum. I think you have the wrong expectation. The M2070 is a pure compute board and was never intended to use for remote graphics. So why should there be a newer driver for current ESX versions?

Regards

Simon

7

Sorry perhaps I have posted in the wrong forum, I have already mentioned several times above that I am asking about vSGA not vGPU. To me this is still a form of virtual gpu technology so I may have missed the distinction. If you can point me at the more appropriate forum I’m happy to post there.

The "Q" (quadro) version of the 2070 board most definitely supports usage for remote 3d graphics acceleration (even offered as an option by HP for their servers). It works for this purpose and is supported on ESXi 5.5 using drivers noted above, so I don’t see why it is so unreasonable to expect/enquire about the availability of a 6.x driver.

I never anywhere said I expect vGPU/GRID support.

8

Hi Madz,

the 2070 is a Tesla board and not a Quadro board. In addition it has a Fermi generation chip which is pretty old. We introduced GRID/vGPU with Kepler architecture so I really don’t understand your expectation for this very old board that was released before we ever had the GRID product. I understand you talking about vSGA but from our perspective this makes no real difference.
In addition I couldn’t even find any hint that VMWare would support this board at all for their hypervisor.

Regards

Simon

9

Simon I appreciate you trying to help but as you’re replying as an nvidia employee I expect a little more from your responses than I would if you were just another user trying to help out.

If you look at your driver here, which lists my card (M2070Q) under the supported products:

It clearly states:

  • This driver enables VMware's vSGA shared GPU capabilities.
  • Hardware based graphics acceleration for 3D workloads for VMware Horizon View virtual desktops or vSphere virtual machines.
    • This same driver supports the GRID K1/K2 cards as well as the M2070Q.

    Also if you refer to this nvidia documentation about the card:

    It states on the first page of text under the Overview:

  • Tesla M2070Q is the ideal solution for customers, who want to deploy high performance computing, advanced and remote visualization in a datacenter.

    • In addition I’ll mention again that I am using it just fine for that purpose under ESXi 5.1 and 5.5.

    So hopefully we will not waste any more of each others time with further discussion about whether it supports remote graphics or if I’m being unreasonable in expecting that. All I came on here asking about is availability of ESXi 6.x drivers to continue to provide the same features I am using under 5.x. It appears the answer is no, you don’t have any ESXi 6.x drivers that support the older Fermi based cards. Note that the 5.x driver above supports both Fermi and Kepler cards so I was hopeful later drivers might as well.

    10

    Hi Madz,

    as you already found out yourself there is no driver that supports the old Fermi architecture for current ESX.
    You might be right that there was an old NV driver that supported vSGA from our side but that doesn’t mean it was a supported configuration and the board is not even listed for ESX5.1 or ESX5.5 from VMWare.
    So it was more or less a happy coincidence that this configuration worked perfectly for you in the past.

    I apologize if I couldn’t fullfill your expectation.

    Regards

    Simon

    12

    Hi mcerveny thanks very much for taking the time to try that and type up your detailed reply. It definitely sounded promising - this weekend was the first opportunity I had to get some downtime on the server. I think I managed to go through the steps okay, I did get a few errors when running vmtar:

    only 1 executable load section supported
only 1 executable load section supported
only 1 executable load section supported
not a valid exec file

    and I wasn’t able to rebuild the vib due to signing then even trying Community acceptance level I then get an error:

    [DependencyError]
 VIB NVIDIA_bootbank_NVIDIA-kepler-VMware_ESXi_6.5_Host_Driver_367.124-1OEM.650.0.0.4598673 violates extensibility rule checks: ['(line 29: col 0) Element vib failed to validate content']
 Please refer to the log file for more details.

    So gave up on that, just installed the original driver then replaced the NVIDIA_k.v00 in bootbank with my customised one. Rebooted and the driver seemed to have installed however I got the error:

    Failed to initialize NVML: Unknown Error

    So looks like no dice. Bummer kind of got my hopes up. Unless I’ve done something wrong it looks like as Simon was saying the card isn’t fully supported. A real shame, I guess there’s no hack to get 5.5 drivers working on 6.5 either.

    Anyway thanks again for trying to help.

    BTW is it just me or do email notifications not work on this forum?