vGPU

In the previous sections, we have talked about two different models for delivering high-end graphics. However, there are a couple of limitations to each of these solutions.

With vSGA, you get the scalability in terms of the number of users that can use the GPU card; however, because it does not use the native driver provided by the GPU vendor, then some of the ISVs will not certify their applications running on this solution. They would need to certify the VMware SVGA driver, as that's the driver that's used.

So, the answer to tackle the ISV support issue is to use vDGA, which does use the native GPU vendor's graphics driver, but now you are limited in terms of scalability and the high cost. Having a virtual desktop machine dedicated to a GPU, with only a handful of GPUs available in each host server would make for quite an expensive solution. Having said that, there may be a use case where that would be the correct solution.

What we need is a solution that is the best of both worlds; a solution that takes the shared GPU approach for scalability, yet uses the native graphics drivers. That solution is called vGPU, and was launched as part of Horizon 6 and the 6.1 release.

The following diagram shows the architecture for vGPU:

In this model, we have the native NVIDIA driver installed in the virtual desktop machines, which then has direct access to the NVIDIA GRID card in the host servers. The GPU is then effectively virtualized and time-sliced, with each virtual desktop machine having a slice of that time.