so i have a project i’m trying to figure out.
i own a cabinet shop, and do our designs in sketchup . what i want to do is have a server that has 4-6 windows VMs that can have OpenGL 3.0 support.
do i need a gpu for this? if so, what one would you recommend to fit in a r710
my main reason for this is so the people in the shop can pull up the job files and they can get the details they need. i really don’t want a bunch of computers in a dusty shop.
the second part of this is the thin client . ive seen people using android devices as thin clients, does this work ok? i was thinking of getting some andriod TVs to put in shop.
It supports passthrough, is open source and available by default on every distro, and is the basis of a whole bunch of enterprise virtual machines, so it’s well-tested.
Yes. Use it. I’m using VMWare Workstation 12 for gaming in Windows Guest. It lacks DX11 support but It works excellent for DX9 and OGL 3.x. I also used it for one of uni projects that required coding for Windows in OpenGL 3.3 or 3.1 I don’t remember and it worked flawlessly.
Performance is… fine. I mean don’t expect anything spectacular but 60 fps fhd in FO NV is totally doable. 20-ish something in Skyrim on old GPUs like gtx 580 (ofc I’m talking about maxed graphics settings). That should give rough estimation of performance.
TL;DR it’s pretty capable
Small note - iirc VMWare Workstation officially supports only NVidia cards on Linux with official binary driver. I don’t know how much “officially” and how much “actually” because for Intel HD Graphics support can be force enabled with vmx file switch and it actually works (mostly, I used it on laptop. Sometimes glitches but works). Here’s solution: https://askubuntu.com/questions/832755/no-3d-support-is-available-from-the-host-on-all-vmware-guests
ok so i kinda got confused with vmware. i really just want to use exsi. i only saw vmware 6.0u3 on the dell site for my r710. i’m thinking 6.5 isn’t supported on the 710. anyone know if esxi 6.0 supports opengl 3?
I think @imhigh.today’s advice is the path you want to take. Workstation is a type 2 hypervisor, its not the right tool for your use case. ESXi is vmware’s type 1 hypervisor, but you are still in trouble with licensing in regards to GPU pass-through. ESXi is user friendly, lots of info and training out there, but corporate and locked down to get you to pay for various licenses. IMO your best bet is KVM, read up on it, and GPU pass-through (and the hurdles of mounting GPUs in server gear) to get a game plan. Then the ‘second half’ of your use case would be thick clients you use to VNC into VMs IMO, because thin clients and zero clients yet again dips you into a lot of difficulty. Maybe not so much for thin clients, but zero clients are a whole nother can of worms if you are doing this on a budget.
You can install up to the latest (6.7) ESXi on Dell 11th gen servers and it will work. “Unsupported” in an enterprise software context often just means that the vendor can refuse to provide technical assistance.
In plain ESXi the video device that gets attached to VMs is implemented in software and won’t perform reasonably for a 3D application even if it does support the required OpenGL features.
An R710 also doesn’t have much in the way of GPU support even just in terms of suitable PCIe slots and power delivery. The onboard video device is very minimal and not even comparable to Intel integrated graphics.
If your main concern is dust, and for so few seats, I think you would be better off looking into fanless PCs than VDI, especially if your GPU requirements are mild. You could maybe use the R710 for NAS.
Actually you won’t even create VM with GPU acceleration on ESXi in normal way (like in Workstation). It’s possible to import VM with GPU acceleration enabled from Workstation (via .ova) and it somwhat will have emulated GPU but I don’t know if it’s emulated fully in software or in manner similar to Workstation but I doubt so, it’s probably software. Type 1 hypervisors won’t have GPU acceleration in a sense from VirtualBox or Workstation because GPU acceleration in type 2 hypervisors bases on graphical system of host and type 1 hypervisors typically run headless so it can’t be used the same way.
If you want to use GPU in machine like r710 (assuming it has pci-e slot because I don’t know this hardware but i see it seems to have at least one pci-e slot) you could try something like AMD FirePro s7150 or NVidia GRID / some higher Tesla from Ebay. They run quite cheap, just be advised s7150 doesn’t support Linux guests. Those cards support SR-IOV so they can be passed-through to multiple VMs simultaneously. According to this photo I found around the web R710 can take gpu: https://i.imgur.com/vdA4QjI.jpg Also please note that cards like Tesla and FirePro don’t have fans but they are designed for airflow typical for servers so they should work just fine in R710. (NVidia has shit licensing for GRID tho, so be warned)
Regarding software 3d support in ESXi it exists and I did even manage to run Blender in such VM but performance is really bad. It “works” though from API support standpoint so apps shouldn’t crash or something. They’ll just run like potato.
Another “hacky” idea is DisplayLink. USB pass through should be quite easy in ESXi and you can buy DisplayLink usb dongles. Those gimmicky devices present themselves to guest OS using the same kernel driver as virtualized GPUs in Workstation or VBox so they do provide some limited GPU acceleration in hardware. But again don’t expect stellar results. I use one headless VM attached directly to such DisplayLink dongle but this time I honestly didn’t fully test performance. I only know that it does run Blender but I didn’t load any complex models like in ESXi so I can’t tell. It’s definitely fine for watching movies tho and they claim 4k support
If you’re interested in any praticular application I could test it on DisplayLink passed to VM as well as in ESXi VM with software 3d gpu. We have several Dell PowerEdge R710 with dual Xeon X5675 in lab.
Last “poor man’s” option I see is just setting up linux with graphical system and VMWare Workstation and then enabling Workstation Server to share VMs in VDI manner. That way you should be able to successfully share 1 GPU amongst 4-6 VMs.
thank you guys for the input. i will say sketchup is very light on gpu use. i have a really old gpu with 512 memory and it runs fine. it seems to me that going with s7150 or something mite be the way to go. i like how you say the “poor mans” way is to go workstation, but i would have to pay $250 dollars for that alone. i’m not worried about no gpu support on linux, even though i do plan on having a couple of Linux VMs for playing around.
what budget used server GPU would you guys look for?
also any thoughts on using adroid TVs as thin clients?
Well it’s not like R710 is low end machine, thus I assumed budget Especially if you compare it to cost of S7150 (which is not that terrible actually iirc around 1k$ on Ebay) or Tesla M60 which is cheapest reasonable option from NVidia for like what - 4k? 8k$? Those GPUs with hardware virtualization really do cost kidney if you’re on budget.
The real problem is that unlike S7150 (which provides free drivers), you can’t buy NVidia from Ebay because GRID software required for GPU virtualization feature is paid and can’t really be bought separately. Typically you need to buy it together with card from integrators/vendors and that means you have to buy brand new card. It stinks. I wanted to get M60 for PC but getting new card like this is not my league entirely. S7150 doesn’t do it for me as I also need acceleration in Linux guests which are not supported on AMD unfortunately. Otherwise AMD would be no-brainer.
Regarding streaming if you go with VMWare then there’s VMWare Horizon or whatever was it called. Finding remote desktop solution that works for heavily interactive scenarios like this one is actually really hard. Most of software that meets requirements is paid.
ok i wasn’t thinking of doing virtual pass through were you need a grid or mxgpu. i wass thinking vSGA. is that not the same thing that vmware workstation uses? by the way i have tested VMware workstation a few months back and it worked great with sketchup. i’m just trying to do the same with a type 1 hypervisor.
and you are right about the price! i wasn’t thinking s7150 was that much. i was looking at the vsga cards and seems like you can get some of those for cheap. and some of those are the s7000 so i got confused with all the stupid numbering on all the gpus.
The main issue you’ll run into is that only a select few Nvidia GPUs can do what you want, and both ESXi and Xen server have licensing issues for Vmware Horizon for vSGA and the equivilent for Citrix being Xendesktop (iirc).
There’s a few way to kind of do what you want, though it would still require PCIe passthrough:
If you care about users only being able to access their own VMs and not fuck with other peoples VMs (mainly turning them off and on) then you could do this:
Get a GT 710 per Windows VM, load up ESXi onto the R710, install vCenter server (requires a purchased license). You can create additional users for the vCenter server and segment the VMs so that when a user logs in, then can only see their individual VM. From there, you could have a lightweight desktop client and connect to the Windows VM with the HTML5 GUI provided by the vCenter Server (free), or connect to the vCenter server through VMware Workstation (expensive, unless you use a pirated key)
If you know your clients will play nice and not fuck with each other’s Desktops, you could forgo the vCenter Server part and just make sure they don’t change anything on the ESXi host, again using PCIe passthrough for the GPUs. The Web GUI for remote consoles on ESXi are flash based however, and are therefore garbage, so you’d want to use VMware Workstation to interface with the VMs unless you just don’t need to do that very much.
I’m unsure on possible ways with Xen server, but iirc to do something similar, only the Web GUI would be available to do it.
Both those solutions are Kludgey, but would theoretically work. vSphere Essential Kits is the cheapest version of vSphere at around $500 US, and VMware workstation is $250 per license.
One last thing is that I’m not 100% sure of the IOMMU groupings ont he R710 with the two Riser cards. I’d check that before buying anything, if you were to do this.
