Jeremy Stroebel - All Things Tech in SMB

I was all excited to post this, as I spent a decent amount of time on this subject leading up to ordering our new servers, and hadn't seen anyone else address it yet.  Then yesterday Jan Hendricks posted his thoughts on the subject which mirrored much of my findings ( https://jhmeier.com/2017/11/15/data-comparison-of-nvidia-grid-tesla-p4-and-p40/ ).  I guess that motivated me to finally finish my thoughts and get it posted as well! NVIDIA GRID 5.0 & Tesla Pascal Cards Photo Credit:  http://www.nvidia.com/object/accelerate-inference.html With NVIDIA GRID release 5.0 came support for Pascal GPUs.  While this brought many things (covered many other places), the most interesting part of this for me was that now ANY Tesla Pascal GPU works with NVIDIA GRID.  This opened us up to a wider array of options right away with 3 PCIe cards already generally available and an MXM option.  While NVIDIA pushed the P40 as the natural replacement for the M60, I wanted to look at all of o

My last post talked about our new Dell R740s.  Response to that post have pointed out that there are a few things worth following up with since people have been having some issues with this server/Intel Gold 61xx Processors. I had a few minor issues getting XenServer installed, but mostly around storage and networking. *I should note that my servers are showing crash dumps in XenCenter, but everything is working perfectly.  Waiting on my support case to have those SSRs analyzed (case originally started to ask about support for the H740p card in XS7.2).  I will post and update when I hear back tomorrow morning. Storage Controller - H740p We went with the H740p card which is not supported on XenServer 7.2 (although support tells me it may be soon) so we had to go to 7.1.1 (7.1 CU1) and install the driver at  https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX226401 .  If you had to load this to detect disks, make sure you install it AGAIN at the end during supplemental packs to actually have

The past few weeks I've been busy deploying two new VDI severs for our Citrix XenDesktop environment to replace our existing two servers.  Before I get into that, lets go back to where this journey started and how I got here... The Beginning of my VDI journey Back in May 2014, after being introduced to NVIDIA GRID/vGPU, I started down a journey to architect a VDI solution for our Architecture and Landscape Architecture staff that would allow us to transition from huge, expensive, physical desktops to a more flexible, mobile, and consolidated system.  That journey started with a POC on XenServer with XenDesktop (it was the only one to support vGPU at the time) using a re-purposed HP DL380p G8 (being used as a VMware server host), which went through a couple different hardware iterations.  Final specs below: HP DL380p G8 2x Intel Xeon E5-2667 v2 @ 3.30 GHz (8 Core) 320 GB RAM 2x NVIDIA GRID K2 (4 GPUs on 2 boards) After nailing down the optimum CPU and GPU configuration

Welcome to my new blog!  I was inspired the past week to start writing by Carl Webster's talk at the CUGC XL event in Milwaukee, WI where he talked about how he got started and became a mainstay in the Citrix community (earning him a Lifetime achievement award)! Who knows at this point what this blog will become, but I see it as a way of posting and sharing the internal research and projects I'm working on as a head of IT at a medium size architectural firm in Indianapolis and maybe even some of my personal projects.  That could include anything from Architectural Software (Revit, AutoCAD, Sketchup, Rendering, etc), Citrix Software, Microsoft Solutions, or anything else that I deal with on a daily basis in my job.  I'm also big into home automation and IoT at home where my house has become a digital playground of devices. Hopefully my musing and research is helpful to others and maybe eventually becomes a place to turn to for information or discussion!