6.1.1

Install an NVIDIA GRID Driver on RHEL 6.6
To install an NVIDIA GRID driver on a RHEL 6.6 virtual machine, you must disable the default NVIDIA
driver, download the NVIDIA GRID drivers, and configure the PCI device on the virtual machine.
Prerequisites
n
Verify that the PCI device was added to the RHEL 6.6 virtual machine. See “Add a vDGA Pass-Through
Device to a RHEL 6.6 Virtual Machine,” on page 18.
Procedure
1 Disable and blacklist the default NVIDIA Nouveau driver.
You must take this step before you can install the NVIDIA GRID driver.
a Edit the grub.conf file.
sudo vi /boot/grub/grub.conf
b Add the rdblacklist=nouveau line at the end of the kernel options.
c Edit the blacklist.conf file.
sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
d Add the following line anywhere in the blacklist.conf file.
blacklist nouveau
2 Restart the virtual machine.
The display has a changed look and feel.
3 (Optional) Verify that the Nouveau driver is disabled.
/sbin/lsmod | grep nouveau
If the grep search does not return any results, the Nouveau driver is disabled.
4 Download the NVIDIA drivers from the NVIDIA Driver Downloads site.
Select the appropriate driver version from the drop-down menus.
Option Description
Product Type
GRID
Product Series
GRID Series
Product
Select the version (such as GRID K2) that is installed on the ESXi host.
Operating System
Linux 64-bit or Linux 32-bit
5 Open a remote terminal to the virtual machine, or switch to a text console by typing Ctrl-Alt-F2, log in
as root, and run the init 3 command to disable X Windows.
6 Install additional components that are required for the NVIDIA driver.
sudo yum install gcc-c++
sudo yum install kernel-devel
sudo yum install kernel-headers
7 Add an executable flag to the NVIDIA driver package.
chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-346.47.run
Chapter 2 Configuring Linux Machines for vDGA
VMware, Inc. 19