Jeremy Stroebel - All Things Tech in SMB

Coming from K2 based servers, we did  not have the GPU monitoring capabilities or NVENC in our existing VDI servers.  That being said, the new monitoring features available on Maxwell and Pascal series GPUs have exposed some interesting sizing considerations when using NVENC. As we've been putting the new Tesla P4 based servers into production, we've noticed much higher GPU usage at idle than expected.  Initially, to compensate, we've increased the framebuffer profile from "P4-1Q" to "P4-2Q" and see if that solved the performance issues and high framebuffer usage.  Indeed it did, so I went searching for why! Turns out (and this make total sense) that the encode process is using additional video RAM over what it was using without NVENC.  Using RDanalyzer I looked at the encoder memory usage for Single, Dual, and Quad monitor systems using both CPU and GPU encode.  See the table below: Takeaways: The NVENC vRAM/FB usage increase is approximat...

We have had issues on our two R740s with clocks becoming out of sync even with NTP servers setup.  Our first assumption was that we had set something up wrong... These were good references to rule that out and show we had an actual issue: NTP Sync: https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX226572 Tips by Tobias: https://discussions.citrix.com/topic/381709-xenserver-70-and-ntp/ Restarting the NTP client synced the time, but within a few days the times would both be wrong (slow) by dozens of minutes and sometimes even up to an hour or more.  Both hosts would also be significantly different.  While one would be off by 45 minutes the other might be off by an hour and 15 minutes.  This was obviously something more and needed to be escalated to support. Here is what came from the support call: The agent changed the current clock source from tsc to xen by running the following at the console. echo "xen" > /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clo...

My previous post ( https://allthingstechsmb.blogspot.com/2017/11/dell-r740-issues-with-xenserver-7172.html ) indicated I was setting up 2 new R740s for our upgraded CAD/Revit VDI deployment.  We've had a few issues/learning experiences.  This is an extension of that posts with things I've found out since and new issues that have come up.  In addition, XenServer 7.3 solved one of our issues. Storage Controller - H740p This is a continuation of the issue with the H740p driver from the previous post.  This issue was resolved in XenServer 7.3, with the supported driver being included in the 7.3 install media. Crash Dumps when booting in UEFI mode While they have worked perfectly, I have been seeing crash dumps reported in XenCenter on every reboot when XenServer is installed in UEFI mode.  If you boot with BIOS and install, there are no Crash Dumps. Per Rody Kossen (@R_Kossen), This will be fixed in XenServer 7.4, which is unofficially set to be rel...

Since the beginning of Windows 10 in our company I have been stumped by failing Windows 10 Feature Updates... It got the point (after spending 80-120 hours) that our upgrade process for Windows 10 to Windows 10 builds involved formatting the machines and reinstalling all software.  Needless to say, this was a major headache. Since the release of 1709 for Semi-Annual Channel, my machine has failed to update multiple times and I decided I would submit myself to the pain and suffering of attempting to resolve it yet again.   Windows update would show an error code of 0x80070057.  Most of the advice online says to reset windows update, delete SoftwareDistribution, etc.  I've tried all of that 100s of times before, so I went to find the setuperr.log file in the hidden directory on C. In that log file I saw a bunch of errors (some below): 2018-01-30 01:11:49, Error                 CONX   0xd000003...

Yesterday at the Indianapolis CUGC meeting, Liquidware presented on their ProfileUnity solution.  Questions came up about Autodesk software in FlexApp and brought up an ongoing conversation about how to make this work both in FlexApp and with Portability/ProfileDisk. Here are the issues I have encountered and how to resolve them or work around them. Multiple Year Versions of the Same Product - FlexApp As an architectural design firm, we utilize Autodesk Revit as our primary design software.  The model files from Revit are essentially single file databases which undergo a schema update when upgrading to newer versions.  Autodesk has decided against spending time to develop a solution for saving back to older versions, so once a file is upgraded it can no longer be opened in an older version.  This means we tend to keep a couple different versions of Revit installed to minimize the need to upgrade files mid project and to work with consultants that may not be on t...

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...

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...