6.0.2

With the Hardware option, you must strictly control your vSphere environment:
n
For vSGA (Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration), all ESXi hosts must be version 5.1 or later and must
have GPU graphics cards installed.
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For vDGA (Virtual Dedicated Graphics Acceleration), all ESXi hosts must be version 5.5 or later and
must have GPU graphics cards installed.
When all GPU resources on an ESXi host are reserved, View cannot power on a virtual machine for the next
user who tries to log in to a desktop. You must manage the allocation of GPU resources and the use of
vMotion to ensure that resources are available for your desktops.
Select the Manage using vSphere Client option to support a mixed configuration of 3D rendering and
VRAM sizes for virtual machines in a pool. In vSphere Web Client, you can configure individual virtual
machines with different options and VRAM values.
Select the Software option if you have ESXi 5.0 hosts only, or if ESXi 5.1 or later hosts do not have GPU
graphics cards, or if your users only run applications, such as AERO and Microsoft Office, that do not
require hardware graphics acceleration.
Configuring Desktop Settings to Manage GPU Resources
You can configure other desktop settings to ensure that GPU resources are not wasted when users are not
actively using them.
For floating pools, set a session timeout so that GPU resources are freed up for other users when a user is
not using the desktop.
For dedicated pools, you can configure the Automatically logoff after disconnect setting to Immediately
and a Suspend power policy if these settings are appropriate for your users. For example, do not use these
settings for a pool of researchers who execute long-running simulations.
Examining GPU Resources on an ESXi Host
To better manage the GPU resources that are available on an ESXi host, you can examine the current GPU
resource reservation. The ESXi command-line query utility, gpuvm, lists the GPUs that are installed on an
ESXi host and displays the amount of GPU memory that is reserved for each virtual machine on the host.
Note that this GPU memory reservation is not the same as virtual machine VRAM size.
To run the utility, type gpuvm from a shell prompt on the ESXi host. You can use a console on the host or an
SSH connection.
For example, the utility might display the following output:
~ # gpuvm
Xserver unix:0, GPU maximum memory 2076672KB
pid 118561, VM "JB-w7-64-FC3", reserved 131072KB of GPU memory.
pid 64408, VM "JB-w7-64-FC5", reserved 261120KB of GPU memory.
GPU memory left 1684480KB.
Chapter 11 Provisioning Desktop Pools
VMware, Inc. 123