Nvidia Tesla with Nvidia GRID vGPU

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We plan to implement remote management using 2 Nvidia Tesla M60 graphics cards with the option of further expansion, using the HP Apollo 2600 server for this.
As far as I understand, to deploy remote virtual management, we need Nvidia GRID program. To ensure the work of 2 people with one card - you need a license GRID Virtual Workstation (vWS) with the type of management M60-4Q Designer. And for the purchase of this license and security, a mandatory purchase of SUMS service is required for at least a year.

I would like to clarify:

  1. Did I understand everything correctly, or is there any more clarification on this issue?
  2. Video cards Nvidia Tesla M60 will be used primarily for processing 3D modeling software Bentley Microstation v8. Processed models will be very large (for the entire street) and will be very detailed. Is there enough power for this video card for two users?
  3. Does the license need to buy one single license or one license for each graphic card? As far as I understand, it’s the only one, or is it not quite so?
  4. We plan to grow powers, by adding processors and graphic cards in future. Because we might have needs to expand powers for 20 users. Will we need to buy a new (one more) license when I expand in the same server in a future?

We use XenApp Citrix.

Thank You!

2

Hi

  1. Yes you’ve understood correctly, however with GRID 5 (which is available from Sept 1st), the vWS license has been replaced by vDWS.

  2. Yes, the M60 will be powerful enough for Bentley MS, however you should now be looking at the NVIDIA P40. The P40 has 24GB of FrameBuffer, however it only has a single GPU. That said, it runs on the newer, more efficient Pascal architecture. Looking ahead, the P40 will have more features available to it because of the software developments of GRID.

3 & 4) GRID is licensed by "Concurrent User". So you only need as many licenses as you have users concurrently accessing the GPU resource. So for 2x vDWS users, you need 2x vDWS licenses / 20x vDWS users you need 20x vDWS licenses.

With applications like Bentley MS, you should be using XenDesktop, not XenApp. With XenApp, you will run in to performance / contention issues. I’ve used Bentley, so I’m well aware of how it uses resources. It can be extremely resource hungry.

I can only advise on my own experiences but depending on the size of your Bentley models, you may very well need the full 8GB per user, this also depends on how many monitors you use and the resolution of them.

Test the solution for performance and load before committing to a deployment strategy, as the results will determine which path you take and the specification of your VMs which will then define how many users you can fit per physical server. The M60 is a dual GPU card and it has 2x 8GB GPUs available. As you have 2x M60s in a single server, you have 4x GPUs to use. If you can get away with a 4GB vGPU profile, then you’ll be able to get 8x users on a physical server as long as you don’t hit CPU or RAM limitations. If you run in to resource limitations, then you’ll obviously have to reduce the user count until the performance returns to a suitable level. However you’ll obviously need more physical servers to support your 20 users when you scale out.

If you choose the P40, you’ll have more options in terms of capacity, as there are differing types of vGPU profile available. I’ve attached a .jpg of all available vGPU profiles for GRID 5 in this post: https://gridforums.nvidia.com/default/topic/1286/general-discussion/nvidia-announce-grid-5-update-/

So if you were to purchase 1x P40, and you were able to use the 4Q vDWS profile, then you may be happy with 6 users per physical server (remember, these are high performance workstation users, not standard users, so the density must decrease). Or, if you wanted to use the 8Q vDWS profile, then purchase 2x P40 and you’ll get 6 users per server (CPU and RAM permitting)

As said, the only way you’ll really know which specifications are best for your workload, is to test and see how everything performs. However, I would still recommend that you use XenDesktop, not XenApp. And As I’m sure you’ll know, Bentley is very CPU heavy, so make sure you have the latest CPU generation with high clock speed and core count, as Bentley uses both!

Regards

3

BJones,

Thank you for the additional information above about the P40. We have a desire to utilize the P40 cards in Dell PowerEdge R740 servers running VMware vSphere 6.5 and Horizon 7.x. However, I am finding NO documentation on the P40 specifically related to VMware Horizon and additionally the P40 is not listed on VMware’s HCL. When do you expect further information and support to be released for the P40 and VMware?

Thank you!

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Hi TOuimet

To keep this Topic relevent, I’ve responded here on your original post - https://gridforums.nvidia.com/default/topic/1286/general-discussion/nvidia-announce-grid-5-update-/

Regards

Ben

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Dear, B. Jones.

Thank You for your support!
We will use Citrix XenDesktop.

For server we are planning to use 512Gb of ECC. 2 Xeon Processors E5-2690v4.
2 x Nvidia Tesla M60

This configuration based for 4 users for start.

Will be this configuration enough?

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Hi Sergey

Yes those CPUs should be fine, and if during testing you find that you can use the 4GB vGPU profile, then it gives you the potential to add more users to the server. There is also an 8 Core 3.2Ghz v4 which could be another option.

512GB is a lot to split between 4 users. You could use far less than that and still have more than enough.

How much CPU / RAM are you looking at allocating each VM?