I’ve just purchased some servers that have NVidia Tesla M60 cards in, with the intent of using them with VMware vSGA in Horizon View. I do not wish to use vGPU at all.
I’m looking for drivers for the cards, and sure enough there is a sticky thread on this forum describing the need to register with the licensing portal.
My question is: Do I need to buy and manage GRID licenses in order to use the Tesla M60’s with vSGA? If the answer is no, which I believe it is, why on earth are we forced to download and install evaluation software just to get hold of the correct drivers? Something here isn’t making sense to me.
your assumption is wrong. You would need vPC license for every user running vSGA. This is the reason why you need to register for eval in order to get the drivers.
Does Nvidia use hard licensing? What happens if you use all your concurrent licenses? Will you be able to power on new VMs with GPU? Can you indefinitely overcommit the user licensing?
You can always power on your vGPU enabled VMs. Licenses are allocated after the VM has booted and contacted the license server. If no licenses are available for allocation, then your VM will run with greatly reduced performance / functionality.