Horizon View Hardware-accelerated graphics

Early versions of virtual desktop technology faced challenges when it came to delivering high-end graphical content, as the host servers were not designed to render and deliver the size and quality of images required for such applications.

Let's start with a brief history and background. The technology to support high-end graphics was released in several phases, with the first support for 3D graphics released in vSphere 5, with View 5.0 using software-based rendering. This gave us the ability to support things such as the Windows Aero feature, but it was still not powerful enough for some of the high-end use cases due to this being a software feature.

The next phase was to provide a hardware-based GPU virtualization solution that came with vSphere 5.1 and allowed virtual machines to share a physical GPU by allowing virtual machines to pass through the hypervisor layer to take advantage of a physical graphics card installed inside the host server.

If we had this conversation a couple of years ago and you had a use case that required high-end graphics capabilities, then virtual desktops would not have been a viable solution. As we just discussed, in a VDI environment, graphics will be delivered using a virtualized, software-based graphics driver as part of the hypervisor.

Also, don't forget that, as we are now using servers to host the virtual desktops, we are using the power of the graphics card in the server, and servers aren't renowned for their high-end graphics capabilities and have limited GPU power, as typically, all a server needs to do is display a management console.

That has all changed now. With the release of View 5.2 back in 2013, the ability to deliver hardware-accelerated graphics became a standard product feature with the introduction of Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration (vSGA), which was then followed by the launch of Virtual Dedicated Graphics Acceleration (vDGA).

We will discuss these two technologies in the following sections of this chapter. We will also discuss the latest installment of graphics capabilities in Horizon View, with Virtual Graphics Processing Unit (vGPU).