ESXI VSGA W7100 FirePro looks promising

Modboxx

Gawd
Joined
Nov 6, 2008
Messages
521
I've been dying to get VSGA going in my home Lab but I haven't been able to find the right card. everything that's cheap is like 1-2gb of ram but this monster on the horizon i can see myself grabbing one. The only problem is I can't find anything on their site or Vmware that says it's supported? I W7000 card is so I'm hoping this new one is too. Anyone heard or seen anything on this?

http://fireprographics.com/vdi/hypervisors/vmware/ VSGA drivers

http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/graphics/workstation/firepro-3d/7100 W7100
 
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I've had this wish for a long time. Being able to feed the hardware into a VM to process the 3D or directX video and then reflect that performance over RDP or a View client.

Ive tested with the NVidia grid and FirePro and the tech just isn't there for remote games. Ive even played a bit with the hidden "cloud" hosted gaming that's in secret beta.

You would think that something easy would be in the VMware software suite but they even leave out important things. One big example is the Pernix Memory driver that allowed you to use system memory to cache your storage reads/writes. Its a simple software driver, why isn't this stuff in the core product!!?!!

If I had to bet money, I would suspect that any card that has ports for a monitor will not be used to accelerate a remotely access VM. If you want to use passthrough to connect a GPU and USB mouse/keyboard to a VM, then it would work.

I dream of the day I will be able to use my smart phone to VPN into my home lab and access my virtual gaming machine. Sadly, I see google fiber and better LTE bringing the needed bandwidth for it but the virtual side slacking on the hardware acceleration support.

Someday!
@vmnick0
 
I've been dying to get VSGA going in my home Lab but I haven't been able to find the right card. everything that's cheap is like 1-2gb of ram but this monster on the horizon i can see myself grabbing one. The only problem is I can't find anything on their site or Vmware that says it's supported? I W7000 card is so I'm hoping this new one is too. Anyone heard or seen anything on this?

http://fireprographics.com/vdi/hypervisors/vmware/ VSGA drivers

http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/graphics/workstation/firepro-3d/7100 W7100

The catch is if the ESXi Drivers will fire with the 7100 card... in most cases they are hard coded to specific cards and those are the only cards that will work. Certification of those cards are determined by the vendor ATI to create a driver then do bench testing and submit for certification. Problem is we dont know exactly the physical changes from 7000 to 7100 for example the Quadro 5000 could use sVGA and dVGA however the Quadro K5000 which is newer (Kepler chipset) only allows dVGA for 3d Graphics and the sVGA driver is hard coded to identify the cards and allow only the Quadro and K1, K2 grids.
 
I just figured that since the w7000 is supported and this one is the next version that it would get supported as well.

I'm not interested in this for games though i wouldn't mind trying some dxva but this is basically for Xendesktop and RemoteFX testing.
 
Totally with you! downside is depending on what in the HW changed is really going to make the difference also if the driver is hard coded... just wanted to share from my experiences with Nvidia cards :)
 
I am working on getting vSGA going in my home lab also. I have a quadro 4000 (just a regular quadro) i'm going to be using on horizon view 5.2. The key to good performance is using Teradici Tera2 based zero clients. They make a world of difference, even over Tera1 clients.

As a matter of fact I am typing this on a Tera1 based client now. The only reason I haven't really pushed to get the system done sooner is my software only performance is so much better than I had anticipated. Windows PCoIP clients are terrible in comparison to teradici clients. On the Tera1 clients I can watch a youtube video in theater mode with no problem at all at 1600x900.

As far as the W7100 being supported for vSGA, it isn't on the HCL so it will not be supported (even on Horizon 6). The drivers are hard coded and will not allow substitutions. The card might be supported later with an update, but currently it isn't. Even vDGA isn't supported with the card.
 
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Zero clients are really cool, however the feature that really stood out between the Tera1 and 2s are the Client side caching in Tera 2 b/c of the increased onboard memory. This feature helped out immensely!
Keep in mind the Windows clients also carry this feature. but i do not disagree Zeros do better in the Video (watching) space. however the windows client does have superiority over the zeros in a few specific key areas when it comes to the usage of SVGA/DVGA cards.

Relative Mouse - For Extreme 3D'ers AutoCAD and Video Games (Windows Client only feature at this time)
USB Support - Basically this is where the Zeros have their biggest faults... the Tera1s will only Max out at 12Mbps and the Tera2s can i think go up to 25Mbps however still falter when consider transmissions for 802.11 G/N/AC can whoop them over WIFI and LAN networks... why does this affect dVGA/sVGA users is b/c most of the time CAD/Photoshop files are HUGE!

Outside of those real 2 things i really love Zero Clients, just aren't practical for large USB transfers over LAN nor will they Play Games sadly...

Have to let me know how that Quadro 4000 works... i am still working with my nVidia Rep to get my hands on a K1A or K2A Grid card for my lab testing... Honestly i would be happy with a Quadro Non-K Series however they might go off the supported list down the road... current drivers work but i have heard rumor that they might get pulled from the driver packages...
 
I feel pretty confident that it will be supported because of this
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Under the virtualization tab you can see the card from the W series link. I'm hoping this is the same deal as in the quadro series where it's not listed on the supported page but clearly works with the nvdia vsga driver.
 
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