video transcoding in virtualized environment with NVIDIA GPU

Virtual GPU Forums General Discussion
1

Hello, I read some topics in this forum, and based on those Q&As I`ll try to formulate my questions.

We are running a virtualized environment today on HP blade servers BL460, virtualizing with vmware sphere 5.5. External Netapp Storage used.
We would like to build new 2 VMs on top of it with video streaming SW WOWZA running in them, that would use the GPU capability of NVIDIA M6 (with NVENC video-codec support). We are aware that HP WS460s blades must be used because technically same BL460 is not supported by HP from some reason. So we would buy two new WS460c blades. HA redundancy is the reason why two, so in case of a host failure the VM would restart on the other.
These VMs (two) would use all the GPUs memory, but would use only relatively small amount of host resources allocated (4vCPU, 32GB RAM each) - that is the reason we do not want to dedicate two hosts only for this HPComputing realtime video-transcoding stuff.

Could you please advise me to decide:

  1. NVIDIA M6 SW licensing is talking only in desktop virtualization terms. The 3 licensing models are reffering to desktop virt. only, I have no clue how would I license a videotranscoding VM - if at all.
  2. In this forum somewhere I read that HPC is not supported in a virtualized environemnt, but that comment was from 2014. Why not? Really not?

So, thank you very much, Daniel

HP WS460c datasheet with a list of supported GPUs:
https://www.google.cz/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjkvNew09DRAhXFBiwKHfetAJEQFggeMAE&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hpe.com%2Fh20195%2Fv2%2FGetPDF.aspx%2F4AA5-7517ENN.pdf&usg=AFQjCNEhu88SEdiGzlT175xIHbGNvJ8XNg&sig2=IyhZWboR_T6MsrKpmrQtWA&bvm=bv.144224172,d.bGs

2

Hi Daniel,

from the link provided I couldn’t find out if you’re going to run the software on client or server OS.
In general this is a passthrough use case and needs a vWorkstation GRID license for client OS. If you run it on a server OS a vApps license might be sufficient as you don’t need the Quadro features and would also be able to use passthrough with vApps and Server OS.

Regards

Simon

4

Hello gentlemen, Im kindly surprised I have got 2 relevant answers just after returning to work after the weekend. Thank you very much for that! Now Im going to dive into the topic, it looks it is going to be fun. :)

5

Hi there. I’m interested in learning how this was resolved. I have a similar question on the vGpu license needed for Plex video transcoding in a hyperV Win10 vm with a Tesla P4 passed through. Want to avoid consuming a vWorkstation license if at all possible.

Roland

6

Roland, we did not built it at the end.

After 4 years, I just suppose it was because of the price. D