6 Gamers, 1 GPU? VMWare Makes It Possible!

[Music] well it's been a long road but we're finally here behold might not look like much but the alternative title of this video might be six gamers one graphics card this is an Nvidia Tesla this is a $10,000 graphics card that's it's basically one generation old at this point but it's still insane there's no there's no video output on this graphics card that's because this card is designed for use in the data center now it's got 32 gigs of insanely fast HBM to memory I mean it's a Tesla V 100 it's just it's completely insane its twin brother is currently in another system we did a video on that it's the deep cool quad stellar yeah remember that lets running an epic 7551 well i've upgraded since then i've upgraded two to epic systems to epic servers it's gonna be a cluster we're halfway there but I'm happy to report all the technology is working this is running heaven on well I'm getting ahead of myself let's talk about the stuff that sort of underpins this first because maybe that'll make more sense and be more interesting alright first up we did a video a little while ago talking about you know what are the possibilities in terms of VMware for virtualization and AMD's epic platform and being able to run a bunch of games all at once under a bunch of virtual machines on that platform now with the single graphics card you know a normal graphics card get a fantastically ancient gtx 660ti which is a little bit of an homage to the new 16 60 TI but we've come full-circle it's a 1 graphics card let's get outputs you can run one thing at a time on it well NVIDIA has something they call grid and it's a whole other suite of complication and grid will let you run multiple virtual machines and share a single graphics card and so that works really well it's not just VMware you can also use Citrix or a combination of VMware and Citrix those work really well together AMD has a similar technology of course AMD's technology is based on SR iov single root IO virtualization and that's also the standard that Intel is going with now single root idle virtualization has been used with network cards so like if you're running a server farm and you have a bunch of virtual machines so you can have one super awesome you know just the most badass network adapter ever 100 Gigabit adapter but if that 100 gig adapter supports SR io v then you can pass that adapter through to all of your virtual machines and they'll physically have that adapter present in them if you follow level 1 we've also done VF IO where we've shown you how to take to physical graphics cards you know to graphics cards a little bit more recent than the 660 of course and run one graphics card for your host computer and one graphics card for a gaming virtual machine we do that with Linux so you can run Linux as a host OS and Windows is a virtual machine and at that point you can basically run anything because the host CPU is shared and there's a lot of hardware extensions that make that possible well with modern graphics cards it's really just down to software I mean even with AMD Vega the SR IV capabilities are there in silicon but they're only turned on in the higher end cards in this case this is the older FirePro at 70 150 but you know the the Vega and well Radeon instinct and and those cards have those SR Iove extensions so it was two different ways to get there these are windows VMs this is just ordinary windows VMs running under vmware and the set up for that is actually fairly complicated right now all of these are running on a single host but like I say I'm planning to build a second host once I've got a second host built we can do all sorts of really fun exciting interesting things like having failover we can also share the resources so right now if I want to run eight gaming VMs or 32 gigs of HBM each one of those is going to have four gigs that dedicated vram if we run a cluster then I've got two cards and the load could be split between the two nodes so that if something goes wrong or server is starting to crash or something those VMs can be migrated by VMware from one host to another and when that migration happens then everything is running out of one graphics card or I can elect to give all of my VMs 8 gigabytes of vram and half of them will be running on one server and half of them will be running on another server but as far as the clients go they don't really know or care that's all handled by something called VMware horizon let's take a look at the clients because all of these client's they're all a little bit different so here we have heaven heaven you know running at a full 60 fps actually a little over 60 fps like 67 68 if you want to run an interactive game or something like that it's perfectly fine runs perfectly well 60 fps you know anything that you could run on a 1080 certainly is gonna run about as well at 32 gigs of VRAM but only 8 for this particular virtual machine so I can run up to 4 VMs on a single Tesla but with 2 Tesla's I could run 8 now the thin climb here is actually from EVGA yeah EVGA there's a name that you've probably heard before I mean they make graphics cards right this is actually a tera dici thin client so this is PC over IP this is the type of you know sort of interface that you might find in a business for doing virtual desktop infrastructure from from EVGA it's got dual DVI you could run you know to DVI monitors it's got USB you can pass through USB peripherals it has headphone microphone you can do video conferencing it's pretty much all that you would need for a true VDI infrastructure now for this machine it's a little more troubling this is a surface pro 3 with the ancient CPU that I was telling you about now when you're gaming you've got to enable the relative mouse movement otherwise you're gonna have a bad time now could you do this with 6 graphics cards and one host computer instead of having to rely on VMware and NVIDIA grid and massive amounts of software licensing that has to go with that I mean that well the software licensing is not an expensive the answer is yes yes you absolutely could set it up with multiple video cards and be good to go in fact that works fine under Linux today in fact Linus has done that you might remember six gamers one pc and then or no seven gamers one pc and then six editors one pc that's that's running Linux or unread and you know he's done a really good job setting up you know the dual Xeon server that the editors are gonna run from and crazy enhance Titan graphics cars and stuff like that you don't really see that too much in the enterprise until Google's stadia and if you notice Google stadia and some of the you know some of the stadia like services that have come out and been advertising lately they're using gaming graphics cards in the data center for virtual machines and they're it doesn't really matter it's like no we can buy one dedicated graphics card for every user that's going to use our system that will just you know route them to the appropriate system you can totally do that even with horizon but the Nvidia drivers frowned upon that if I detect that they're running in a situation like with vmware or other virtualization they'll actually generate a code 43 error and the drivers will not load now if you've got a Quadro or a tesla card or something that is you know made for the data center then it'll work at the end of the day the hardware is very close to the same if not identical I mean the vram is gonna vary a little bit but in terms of like what Linus did with the r-tx graphics cards that's actually a better situation in terms of performance and in terms of the per user experience because you got to think there plug in the monitors and graphics cards directly into each a video card the same way that we do with VF i/o of course you know if you if you're an individual doing VF I you only have the one graphics card but still this is a great exercise to learn VMware if you come through this setup on your home machine and you set up a Raspberry Pi will you connect to with your VMware cluster I'm pretty sure that you can get your VMware certification no problem no questions asked now before we do benchmarking or any of the nitty gritty details like that it's a little um I'm not sure I'm gonna make sure that I can clear the benchmark numbers so that we can talk about performance and specifics and things like that but I can just tell you I mean if you've got seven r-tx graphics cards versus two Tesla's the Arctic's graphics cards they're gonna win and it's gonna be a better situation but it's different technologies for different setups this type of setup is more like what you would have any enterprise and some of you guys for work you may even use VDI virtual desktop infrastructure that's what this is although most VDI infrastructure is set up to try to save as much money on hardware and licensing as possible so a lot of people have a really crap VDI performance I mean there's gonna be a lot of people in the comments that are checking in and saying yep can't confirm we're on VDI and sometimes it takes me like 20 minutes to log in with this setup even using horizon to create new VMs when I log in it only takes about three seconds like from the initial VM boot up and it's like somebody is ready to log in to a new VM from nothing there's no VM it's not created at all horizons snapshots that master VM snapshots not really the right word but horizon clones that VM and for that waiting person and then you're good to go now like with Google stadia what comes up is oh man what about the latency you're encoding decoding doing all this stuff and it's flying over the network there's gonna be tons of latency well we bit the modified mouse and we've got all these different machines we got a Raspberry Pi which is pretty much worst-case scenario in terms of compute horsepower for this kind of stuff but the Raspberry Pi does have a hardware h.264 decoder so we've got Hardware encoders on the Tesla and Nvidia is actually very very good with their hardware encoders they're their industry-leading right now in terms of like their hardware encoding for multiple sessions like we're running here and so that hardware encoder decoder really cuts down the latency makes it a lot more stable and makes it more consistent which is why you can actually have a pretty decent gaming experience on a Raspberry Pi now VMware is not designed for gaming and I'm not recommending it for gaming and you should totally not set up your own you know cyber cafe with gaming it doesn't make economic sense the technology's not really there but if you are doing something like fluid simulation or CAD or any kind of high assurance job where you want to maintain control of the intellectual property then you absolutely can do it at 60 FPS with insanely high performance with top-end Tesla cards and yes you can add six or seven or ten or 20 Tesla cards to a server or pool of servers so that you've got that kind of graphics compute horsepower available to all the clients that might be using those virtual machines in your cluster but back to gaming what are the brass tacks latency numbers for gaming well we've got our modified Mouse this modified Mouse when you click the mouse button it lights up and it's hardwired in there so there's no delay from the time you press the button to the time that the computer registers the click and you do the round-trip so we've got Witcher 3 that we're using I've got the surface 3 now this is a surface 3 with 4 gigs of memory and the core m3 like this is the crappiest surface 3 that you can possibly get and it's on Wi-Fi we've already got like 3 to 6 milliseconds of latency between the surface pro 3 and the VMware machine that's actually hosting this and as you can see the latency numbers are actually pretty good I don't know that I would you know if I were like a champion twitch FPS person if I were fatality I'm not if I were a fatality you know this would be really annoying and terrible but if I'm just playing Witcher 3 I don't know that this bothers me now if we move this server to the data center and we're talking about 10 or 20 or 30 milliseconds of latency I'll be a different story I'm gonna be a follow-up video I don't know but as you can see just testing it here even on the Raspberry Pi like the delay that you see from the Raspberry Pi it's actually pretty good I mean all things considered it's running over the network but there you go now what if you want more than 60 FPS performance well you can get more than 60 FPS performance but it's gonna be at a cost of the other clients because all the encoder and all the machinery here is designed for 30 or 60 FPS depending on what you pick now I've configured VMware and horizon and all the accoutrement to be 60 FPS but 30 FPS is an option 120 FPS is an option but if you're gonna run hundred 20 FPS then it's going to cut the number of clients as you can manage in half now what about performance of the Adobe Creative Suite that's a story for another day I'm Windell this is level 1 I'm signing out [Music]

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 122,496

Rating: 4.9074931 out of 5

Keywords: computers, vmware vdi, tesla v100, S7150 Firepro

Id: gzXnCuc9bAE

Length: 13min 37sec (817 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2019

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