Nvidia GRID 2.0 at Vmware 2015

Among all the new updates announced at Vmware, Nvidia made one of their own. Nvidia announced that GRID 2.0 architecture is going to be released on September 15th. http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-grid-2-0-launches-with-broad-industry-support

This is a huge improvement and opens up for a lot of opportunities, this GRID 2.0 architecture is built upon the latest Maxwell GPU architecture, which can either be in two forms, one using tradisional form factor and the M6 which is aimed for blade servers.

For instance this means that we can deploy a Dell M630 (Which is the 13th Generation Dell blade servers) combines with the Tesla M6 cards. Also with the suppor for Linux on both Vmware Horizon and Citrix XenDesktop this will hopefully enable more use of GPU in Linux based workloads.

Features:

Doubled user density: NVIDIA GRID 2.0 doubles user density over the previous version, introduced last year, allowing up to 128 users per server. This enables enterprises to scale more cost effectively, expanding service to more employees at a lower cost per user.

Doubled application performance: Using the latest version of NVIDIA’s award-winning Maxwell™ GPU architecture, NVIDIA GRID 2.0 delivers twice the application performance as before — exceeding the performance of many native clients.

Blade server support: Enterprises can now run GRID-enabled virtual desktops on blade servers — not simply rack servers — from leading blade server providers.

Linux support: No longer limited to the Windows operating system, NVIDIA GRID 2.0 now enables enterprises in industries that depend on Linux applications and workflows to take advantage of graphics-accelerated virtualization.- See more at: http://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-grid-2-0-launches-with-broad-industry-support#sthash.nekBRGxv.dpuf

Now there is a little Gotcha here… That is GRID 2.0 requires a software licence from Nvidia, you can read more about it at Thomas Poppelgaard’s blog here –> http://bit.ly/1NWbwWC

Also important to remember that Citrix also announced Framehawk support using Citrix Netscaler a few weeks back, combine this with vGPU you get a really good desktop experience.