vSGA

The vSGA implementation allows for multiple virtual desktop machines to share a physical GPU card, which is installed inside the ESXi host server that is hosting those virtual desktop machines.

In this model, the virtual desktop machines do not have direct access to a dedicated physical GPU card. Instead, the standard VMware SVGA 3D graphics driver that is part of VMware Tools is installed on the virtual desktop's operating system. The SVGA driver is a VMware driver that provides support for DirectX 9.0c and OpenGL 2.1.

In this configuration, the driver supplied by the graphics card manufacturer (VIB) is installed on the ESXi hypervisor rather than the virtual desktop machine's own operating system. Graphics commands from user sessions are intercepted by this driver and sent to the hypervisor, which controls the GPU in the ESXi server.

Delivery to the user's endpoint works in the same way, where DevTAP encodes the user experience to PCoIP or Blast Extreme, and delivers it to the end user's device, either in an HTML5 browser or Horizon Client. The following diagram shows an overview of the vSGA architecture:

There are several configurations and support options to consider, which we will cover in the next sections.