Hi I have just got new customer, they are architect company and they have 10x I7 pc with 1080TI. They installed terminal server RDHS last year with following specs.
Bare Metal Windows 2019 terminal server 15RDHS
1x MAINBOARD ASUS WS C621E SAGE
1x 1500 WATT power supply
4x64GB (256GB) ECC 2933mhz Samsung RDIMM RAM
1x INTEL VROC DIRECT CPU RAID 0
2x 4tb 4510 pro dc internet u.2 m.2 ssd
2x CPU Xeon Gold 6154 3.0GHz
1x NVIDIA GT 710
WATER COOLING
at the moment 10 person connect to terminal server which 3 of them use Autocad without gpu acceleration enabled, I guess because they have super fast vroc raid 0 and 2x cpu. these 3 Autocad users connect terminal server in and out of office when they go construction sites.
They want me to install better graphic card hence I found this forum to solve this issue. 10 person will use Autocad in terminal server without having problem. I already suggest them VMware or any VM solution but they don’t want and strictly they want to use flexibility of having bare metal server.
I have 2 suggestion in my mind
option a) 1x RTX 6000 and 10x Vapp ( I suppose even without VM I need this Vapp I don’t know what it is)
option b) 2x RTX 2080 TI with NVLINK and enable graphic acceleration on terminal server.
Do you guys have any suggestion regarding option a or option b or any other option that I can’t think of ?
Do I really need RTX 6000 and vApp when I use baremetal ?
Whichever version of AutoCAD is being used, increasing the CPU Clock Speed will improve the performance. 10 RDSH Users do not need 36 Physical Cores / 76 Threads, and as there are only 10 Users, they can get away with using a lower Core Count but with a much higher Clock Speed. 3.0Ghz is about the minimum you’d want for a good AutoCAD experience and faster is recommended if possible. The following would be my current choice for a 10 User AutoCAD deployment and these CPUs will provide a big increase in overall system performance and especially for AutoCAD:
For the GPU, they should be using one that uses a Quadro driver, not a Consumer Gaming one. They may not need RTX 6000 levels of performance and a cheaper way to do it might be to use something like an RTX 4000 (8GB) or RTX 5000 (16GB). Neither of these will require a license and they will both use the Quadro driver. An RTX 6000 can be used if you think it necessary (there are multiple reasons for choosing this, including future proofing and flexibility), and if you use it with the publicly available Quadro driver (not the vGPU one) it won’t need a license either.
Make sure you monitor the Users physical workstations for hardware utilisation before recommending a GPU. This is a great utility to use to capture those metrics: Releases · JeremyMain/GPUProfiler · GitHub You can then decide which GPU to go for once you’ve accounted for the combined utilisation.
Thank you very much your valuable information and direct me to correct solution, since they already have 2x Xeon 6154 I am just thinking if I could change to 2x Xeon 6250 will there be any tangible outcome.
I am thinking of getting a RTX 6000 with Quadro driver not vGPU for future proof. Is there any benefit of using vGPU on Bare metal anyway? for example I have seen Vapps but I don’t know if I use that on bare metal is it going to be any difference. Do you think 1x RTX 6000 better than 2x Quadro RTX 5000 with NVLINK ?
I will investigate utility you are referring and trying to understand it.
Regarding my CPU recommendation … An increase of nearly 1Ghz per Core for an application that is typically limited by CPU Clock Speed will give a notable performance boost! Usually, choosing the best CPU is a trade-off between Cores vs Clock Speed due to having to support multiple users, however, as your Customer only has 10 Users, there is no trade-off as the fastest Xeon CPUs have enough Cores to support the total user density. That’s a great position to be in! Don’t forget that will be a system wide performance boost, not just in AutoCAD.
The CPUs they currently have are sub-optimal for this specific environment.
If you use a Quadro GPU in Bare-metal or with a Hypervisor in Passthrough with the publicly available Quadro driver, there is no license to pay. Besides, you wouldn’t use vApps licensing with Autodesk products as the performance would be poor.
The RTX 6000 is a better choice in my opinion because it can support vGPU if your Customer ever decided to make the switch to a virtualised environment. Anything in the Quadro line-up below an RTX 6000 does not support vGPU. Regarding NVLink, for this kind of workload I really wouldn’t bother.
My last question is does it make any difference to have 1x or 2x GTX 6000? based on my bare metal server without using VM or vAPP but using just plain Quadro driver?
A single RTX 6000 is more than sufficient for this kind of deployment, if anything it’s too much. A Multi-GPU install would be a complete waste for this deployment, as it would be hugely over-spec’d and underutilised, not to mention Multi-GPU is not recommended for RDSH deployments.
The reason I haven’t recommended a lower spec GPU for this deployment, is because you would then lose future proofing due to the next model down in the Quadro line being an RTX 5000 (even though from a performance perspective, it’s perfectly capable). If I were to suggest a T4 (from the Tesla line), then you would need an external vGPU License Server and you would then need QvDWS Licenses for every Concurrent User.