Today my first official technical white paper got released on VMware.com – titled, Virtual Machine Graphics Acceleration Deployment Guide. It's been a long time coming. It was one of those papers where I could keep adding and adding to it.

The paper talks about the following topics:

• Why 3D Matters for VMware Horizon View
• Understanding the Differences Between Soft 3D/SVGA, vDGA and vSGA
• Prerequisites
• Application Requirements and Use Cases
• vSGA Installation
• vDGA Installation (Tech Preview)
• VMware Horizon View Pool Configuration for vSGA
• Performance Tuning Tips
• Resource Monitoring
• Troubleshooting

Hopefully it should cover everything you need to enable your Horizon View desktops for 3D rendering.

There are a number of other VMware Horizon View: New Technical White Papers that have been released recently that are well worth a read. Check.Them.Out

As part of the VMware Horizon View 5.2 release a few weeks ago, VMware introduced a new technology feature called vSGA (Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration). To find out more about this technology, checkout my VMware View 3D Gaming Experience post.

Two of the common questions I've been asked many times since the release of Horizon View 5.2 are:

• What NVIDIA GPU Cards are supported with vSGA?
• Where can I download the vSphere drivers (VIB's) for vSGA?

Up until now, I've not been able to give a good answer as the release of the VIB's and a list of supported GPU cards are being provided by NVIDIA and not by VMware.

But today both of these questions are answered. (Hurray!).

• Here you can find the VMware HCL for vSGA. (The HCL is quite small at the moment and is by no means complete. Make sure you check the HCL regularly to get the latest supported hardware.)
• Here you can find the VMware ESXi VIB file to enable vSGA.

NVIDIA state the following GPU's are supported with the released VIB:

• Quadro series: 6000, 5000, 4000
• M-Class Processors: Tesla M2070-Q
• GRID Series: GRID K2, GRID K1

For those of you who follow me on twitter you may well have seen me tweeting about the View 3D Experience over the duration of both of this years VMworlds.

Myself and a colleague Tim Federwitz (virtuallygeeky.com) had been tasked to showcase VMware's vSGA (Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration) that will be released in the next release of VMware View at some point in H1 2013.

What is vSGA?

Before I go into what we had running at VMworld, I'll just go into a little more detail about vSGA (Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration).

Read the rest of this entry »