Citrix announced support on 4/8/2013 for vSphere 5.1 GPU acceleration on XenDesktop 5.6 FP1 and XenApp 6.5 FP1. I have to admit that I was pretty excited today when I read this and I can’t wait to do some testing to see the results, and I will definitely be doing some testing on this functionality.
I am seeing more and more request for high quality video from customer’s aCitrix infrastructure, such as medical imaging, 3D rendering etc. The list goes on and on.. Some details are below but definitely worth a read if you are looking at using GPU to enhance your video performance in your XenDesktop or XenApp environment on vSphere 5.1. Check out the full article.
From the article.
VMware recently introduced GPU hardware acceleration support for its latest hypervisor release, vSphere 5.1. XenDesktop 5.6 FP1 and XenApp 6.5 FP1 have tested successfully with the new GPU acceleration capabilities on vSphere 5.1 and Citrix officially supports these configurations.
vSphere 5.1 introduced two GPU acceleration methods: Direct graphics acceleration (vDGA) and Shared graphics acceleration (vSGA). vDGA is similar to XenServer’s GPU pass-through method where each graphics processor supports a single VM to enable high performance rendering for designers and engineers that require a dedicated GPU or for GPU sharing with multi-user XenApp VMs. vSGA is a light-weight implementation of GPU sharing designed for business graphics such as Microsoft Office and Windows Aero graphics and may not be suitable for demanding 3D professional graphics applications such as CAD, geographical information systems and medical imaging. vSGA is based on API Intercept, a software implementation which has the following limitations:
- API Intercept is limited to older versions of OpenGL and DirectX
- API Intercept may not perform well with large 3D models since the graphics commands have to be sent from the user session to Session 0 which controls the GPU
Would you use these features? If so, what would you use it for?
