Flex 170 GPU from Intel - Subscription Free GPU Accelerated VDI on Proxmox 8.1

today is a day of world firsts inside our super micro 111e fwtr that you can hear behind me is Intel's Flex 170 GPU is that GPU almost 2 years old yeah but what's special about this is that this GPU enables costeffective vdi virtual desktops srov pass through and this is running on proxmox 8.1 behind me that's right Sr iov 31 virtual functions on a single GPU has no problem pushing 30 1080p virtual desktop sessions with video acceleration right now today look folks in nvidia's ecosystem are paying licensing subscription fees ongoing every month or every year even if they're on Ancient Pascal or Volta era gpus yeah Nvidia licensing server no one is Keen to do that and Intel Intel's coming to the rescue for our software licensing shackles that that doesn't seem likely BRX MOX is a killer virtualization platform without dramatic uptick and popularity after everyone's noticed their new VMware bills from after the broadcom Takeover how big of a difference does it make enabling gpus in a VM well side by side right here I've got two windows 11 virtual machines they are identical except one of them has a 116th slice of our Flex 170 GPU and both of them have just three compute cores all I've done here is go to the Google Earth web page to look around via remote desktop ouch yeah yeah it does make that big of a difference what about something a little more demanding uh unin Heaven it's an older Benchmark but we're not really going to play games via remote desktop are we you do get a warning on Startup because it can't go full screen and it crashed in our software GPU only this is running between 70 and 100 FPS on Air Flex 170 GPU via remote desktop this is the power of being able to slice a GPU into multiple pieces to run multiple operating systems or different software Stacks you can mix Linux and windows this is a big part of what this channel has been about or what what I been pushing for for the better part of a decade over here with a pure software GPU it can't even launch it there's just it just can't do it while our main focus today is on the flex 170 many of these projects and videos I've been working on for many years is around enabling this same kind of functionality for gamers and Enthusiast too with not a data center GPU if you look real closely at this Flex 170 it's going to look a lot like an a770 as well one GPU Sr iov and all this also works on Alder Lake igpus yeah we're going to talk about that but let's let's get away from this loud pizza box let's go to the lab there's a lot more we got to talk about in the lab let's [Music] [Applause] go Ah that's better isn't it I can hear myself thinking here yeah so the flex 170 if you look at Intel's launch page it says it launched in 2022 last I checked it was 2024 you might be watching this even farther in the future and yet this is actually a very viable alternative for virtual desktop infrastructure if you're not in the loop on how Enterprises use this a lot of companies will deploy like workstations in the cloud for information workers or anybody that's working with sensitive information and the indiv ual will will remote desktop into that machine the idea being that because the information never really leaves the corporate data center that it's a little easier to protect from a governance standpoint if your hospital uses vdi that's usually an easier security posture than just everybody having all kinds of patient files on their individual machines the problem is that up till now vdi has been pretty much universally like the best vdi experience has been Nvidia and it's been Nvidia for the better part of five six years actually the the one two punch of Nvidia plus VMware with their Horizon client they were definitely leading on the Edge Microsoft is catching up really quickly though it's also worth mentioning Citrix because Citrix is a thing and it still works and that sort of thing but I don't see that Citrix is doing nearly the R&D investment that VMware was and that Microsoft is with hyperv I also see a lot of investment in open source stuff but we'll talk about that in a minute now for this platform the flex 170 it is very well supported with both Citrix and VMware so if you want to deploy a flex 170 or a flex 140 those are the two main gpus based solution with VMware uh dell and HP Enterprise have solutions that use this but you know Intel doesn't get the The credibility or at least those have flown a little under the radar it's probably also true that when you're in you know a Dell or an HP and you want to deploy an Enterprise solution a lot of the salespeople are not super glued into competing Technologies and it's like well this is just how we always configure a vdi cluster uh and it's usually got an Nvidia grid type subscription product whereas with this there's no subscription it's just a thing that you buy and that you own and that you can run whatever you want on which is great now again this is what you got to do for proxmox and the sort of off label experience with proxmox but to be clear if you want something that is fully supported VMware and Citrix Solutions are fully supported as is Red Hat open shift support via Red Hat this is a very very important thing to understand because this is completely flown under everybody's radar Intel sunk millions of dollars into supporting vdi with a true VMware Horizon type solution the problem really is in Partners a lot of you in the audience have huge Dell portfolios so if you would assist me like reach out if you have you know more than a couple of million dollars of Dell orders every year or every refresh cycle and say hey we're looking at a vdi solution you know what's my best bang for the buck what are the options and just let me know what you get back you can share in the level one forums or whatever cuz I did that I mean some of you have some really insane Dell portfolios I just just it's just nuts thank you for posting on the Forum and letting us know what you're going through mine's not insignificant either and it took three or four rounds of prodding and directly asking can I get a solution with flex because they didn't really seem to want to sell me a flex solution it was a really interesting series of exchanges and that is the unlevel playing field advantage that I think Intel finds itself in they actually do have the goods as far as technology goes this is an amazing first class experience on VMware esxi from what I've been told the limited number of people that have already gotten their hands on this and certainly in proxmox okay there's a little bit of a wrinkle that I'm having between 31 and seven virtual functions on proxmox but I'm pretty sure I'm going to be able to work that out and that's because I'm doing off label stuff but on red hat open shift it's not an issue and you can do a lot of configuration under Red Hat open shift and you can move between inferencing and vdi and open shift you can have a horizon like experience but with red hat open shift whereas proxmox doesn't have a horizon like experience you can string that together yourself with Powershell and some of the PVE automation API because that's really complete that's maybe a story for another day but Citrix and the integration and VMware and the integration and this the operating system support Intel has it all so why aren't their Partners promoting this more it's the uh the home field advantage the unlevel playing field until getting a little taste of that perhaps a little ironic given their place in history and some of the stuff there but hey this actually is a good product on the technical merits and I'm very impressed with the performance and how it works and I am super stoked that I got it working on proxmox and that it works as well as it does but yeah if you're Citrix or VMware and you're not abandoning Citrix or VMware it'll work out of the box with Citrix and VMware but if you are abandoning VMware and more importantly the vdi subscriptions this is a great place to start looking the other thing is that since Intel Innovation uh Intel's been committing a lot to their open GitHub repositories I've been tracking those very closely you see the number one project that intel was supporting was red Hat's open shift now open shift obviously has a customer that is using a lot of flex gpus in the data center we can Hazard some guesses as to how you know who that is but whoever that is is not keen to talk about it and I probably know why but we can't talk about that in this video that's a whole other story if you're a customer of a company and you you know mix competing products they get a little vindictive oh yeah sometimes in fact in Intel's own press documentation they really only talk about Horizon vmware's product and Citrix which is Citrix virtual apps and desktops they don't mention hyperv and they definitely don't mention anything open source but you see in supporting Red Hat open shift they have to support kernel version 5.15 and it's a little bit of a rabbit hole the world first here is that if you go to download Intel's backport driver it does not work with recent versions of the Linux kernel and we're running proxmox 8.1 which is based around kernel 6.5 it's a nice modern kernel which works really well on Modern Hardware Emerald Rapids Sapphire Rapids even AMD epic haven't tested this on AMD epic but that's on the to-do list so our super micro test platform here is a 32 core Emerald rapid CPU you should definitely check that out on super micro's web page click the link below etc etc like I say I've borrowed this basically from Super micro this is a retail system you can go and buy today this is not uh you know the normal like scratch and dent press system this is actually from Super micro's website where you can buy this exact configuration with these exact options and in fact if you wanted to do 4K you can do 8 4K streams per card this chassis will hold two Flex 170s very very impressive and just to be completely clear VMware does actually have some features that nobody else has like they have this their soft GPU partitioning where they handle it a little bit at a high level in software so you can mix clients with different configurations so you can give one client more vram and another client less vram which normally you have to do splitting it across the actual GPU processor so that's a software thing specific to VMware that really lets you pack in the vdi clients depending on what their desktop needs are Intel solution for that is a flex 140 which is two gpus on a single card that's actually a lower wattage but it gives you more encoders because it has more physical silicon for that sort of thing each GPU on the flexx 140 has 6 gigs of vram for a total of 12 so depending on what your use case is a flex 170 or a couple of flex 170s or a flex 140 or a couple of flex 140s may fit your use case better for me with just 32 cores and 64 threads thinking about this as a pile of systems like if we were going to do this as a truly vdi solution we'd probably get three four five of these pizza box systems from Super Micro build a proxmox cluster configure the vdi resources and then we're in a really really good spot this is so inexpensive because it doesn't have the subscription component of it I mean each one of these is only about five grand if you can pack on 16 people per client you're talking about per seat pricing on the order of like $400 which for a vdi solution basically unheard of so all that was a lot of words but let me just sum it up for you proxmox 8.1 is not officially supported by Intel but I'm actually even talking with folks inside of proxmox who are as excited about this solution as I am they're going to take a look and this may be something that proxmox can officially qualify and support at some point in the future of course all that is going to depend on interest and engagement and everything else there's a link to Super Micro in the description you should definitely check them out for what they've got going on here because this is a genuinely very exciting piece of technology if you want to set this up if you get your hands on a flex 140 or Flex 170 or you order this system from Super Micro and you want to do a test system with proxmox listen if you've got more than like 100 seats in v the $5,000 like cost of experimentation is basically nothing you you could probably requisition this just to say hey can we save this on licensing costs and then from there once you've got your hands on the hardware you can just follow my guide to install the official from the Intel repo driver for this GPU it's in the I 915 driver which sounds a little strange but you can totally do it the modification is basically to just take a safety off and let it build against colel 6.5 we actually got kind of lucky here because kernel 6.5 is also what Ubuntu 22.041 Forum that go to other people that have been setting up srov on consumer Parts sov on consumer Parts you mean Alder Lake yes so if you have something like this from Min Forum this is the ms01 this is client this is desktop this is not a server this isn't anything you should run in production for a server but it has an Intel I 93900 and the same driver stack that Intel has released on GitHub will enable srov on that you can also enable srov on the a770 at least some of them yes there's going to be more details on that but you know limiting the number of srov functions on the consumer cards makes sense you can only have you know a limited number of virtual functions on something like this but if you wanted to run say a Plex Media Server and pass through one of these srov virtual functions even on consumer gpus you can now do that using proxmox and using the resources in the level one Forum to walk you through the guide and install it and whatever as long as you're on that proxmox 8.1 kernel I think you probably could also do this on like a proxmox 7 type kernel because proxmox 7 is using a similar kernel version as red hat open shift but I'm not all about that because I want to use the latest version of the Linux kernel because it has better enablement for everything else not only that but Intel has actually made all of the Motions to roll this into kernel 6.8 so as of Colonel 6.8 and newer you're probably not going to have to even follow anything in the level one guide there might be an override or something that you have to set but basically you can load that custom dkms I 915 module and be able to use the flex one 7 out of the box on a proxmox solution and if you're thinking well because of the resources and everything else we're not going to be able to do uh VM migrations or anything like that no you actually can maybe not a live migration but you actually can do migrations across the members of your cluster in proxmox with this because you set up the resources at the data center level that works fine as far as I can tell and the fact that you can see this level of performance from a virtual machine with just three cores pretty Doone impressive so in case you're wondering uh does it run crisis and the answer is yes seven copies of Crisis and it's hardly using any CPU it's Madness terms of my recommendations this system configured with 256 or 512 GB of memory would easily handle 16 vdi clients I mean 16 vdi clients divided among 64 threads uh it's pretty reasonable and then 16 clients being able to stress a flex 170 yeah it's basically fine if you needed to run uh 16 clients with 4K resolution you're probably GNA be better off with two Flex 17s and digging into the actual Flex 170 specifications because even in the specs they talk about 28 to 31 1920 x 1080 streams at once off of just a single Flex 170 GPU and the flex 170 GPU has 16 gigs of vram so you don't have a ton of vram but that's a pretty good amount of vram and you can see what a performance difference it Mak I mean it makes a difference between being able to run direct accelerated applications and not one last thing this is what I have in mind for how it should work for Consumer if you have an a770 and you can enable some virtual functions on it you would have the same kind of functionality you could mix you know say a Linux based hypervisor and then run a Windows Virtual Machine and a Linux virtual machine and to be able to get reasonable performance and to be able to game I mean a 16 GB a770 split into two 8 GB partitions that would be perfect for the consumer and perfect for experimentation and it sure seems like Intel is Keen to have people experiment with their Sr iov and their vdi solution since it's so functional on Alder Lake on the igpu it's because nobody's going to actually use the igpu in the Enterprise 8770 that's a little bit more of a worry it's fine though they should enable that just go ahead and give us the path to have two virtual functions on the A7 70 so we don't have to accidentally have like 30 that would be awesome the other thing is I think Intel's going to have to get a little bit more comfortable with rando's uh using their stuff for off Lael Solutions I mean Intel doesn't care if an HP Enterprise or Dell is going to take their hardware and come up with some sort of solution it's the smaller companies that uh maybe they're a little worried about it's like hey we Ed the the the flex 170 and our proxmox based cluster and then there was this catastrophic problem at some point in the future and then and you know something went wrong and then Intel has to support that and they didn't mean [Music] to but this is an open source world as long as everyone is good stewards of the open source ecosystem and there's documented interfaces to the firmware I think that's basically going to be okay I think Intel is actually going to get a lot more inroads into this industry I think also that if AMD is paying attention here they really should sit up and take not notied because all it really took for Intel to take over the universe in terms of zeroc cost vdi Solutions was just being a little bit more open about their software API and their their software ecosystem and srov I mean we know sov Hardware is present but like the whole cdna versus rdna I don't even know if we can really do srov on rdna but it seems like AMD is in a tough spot here to be able to respond to something like this assuming that Intel gets some traction and Intel has certainly got traction already with open shift with one of IBM's customers or one or more of IBM's customers and VMware and Citrix maybe not as much as Intel had hoped but it's because of the non-technical control that incumbents have in my opinion the fact that this works as well as it does in my testing so far and my hacked up driver in proxmox 8.1 though extremely encouraging if you have anything you want to test or you want to test your vdi thing on my system remotely let me know contact me in the Forum check out that system with the link in the description and I'm signing out you can find me in the level one forums good [Music] [Music] luck

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 146,730

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: tLK_i-TQ3kQ

Length: 19min 25sec (1165 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2024