Jeremy Stroebel - All Things Tech in SMB

Tony Foster posted this article earlier today about running computer on unused GPUs at night and running VDI during the day on VMware.  I have been using a rudimentary batch script to do the same for XenServer for almost a year now, so I thought I'd formalize it with his inspiration! As always, I'm sure I stole some of this code from someone else, but I have no record of it at this point. The first step to any problem is to define the problem and the steps required to solve it... Problem: During the day our VDI instances use a P4-2Q profile and are spread across 3 hosts.  The off hours workload ideally would have a P4-8Q profile. For this solution we will aim to evacuate 2 hosts of all VDI workloads after hours and restore them before workers return in the morning.  There could be more logic here, including checking to make sure we don't see a spike in after hours usage and need to power down compute workloads to accommodate. Basic steps to solve: 1.) In orde...

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 w...

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 con...