Guest post by Georgene Dee, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, NVIDIA

Live migration has been around for years, but live migration for GPUs has never been possible – until recently. The NVIDIA Virtual GPU March 2018 release with Citrix XenMotion support, delivers the industry’s first and to date, the only support for live migration of GPU-accelerated virtual machines (VMs). Now IT can achieve improved agility and live migrate users in seconds, without end user disruption or data loss.

NVIDIA offers three virtual GPU software products designed to meet the challenges of today’s digital workplace, the NVIDIA Quadro® Virtual Data Center Workstation (Quadro vDWS), the NVIDIA GRID® Virtual PC (GRID vPC) and NVIDIA GRID® Virtual Apps (GRID vApps) and run on NVIDIA® Tesla® GPUs. NVIDIA virtual GPUs power Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp environments, giving every VM the graphics performance of a physical desktop. This provides users a great user experience on any device – from designers and engineers running powerful, graphics intensive 3D applications, to knowledge workers on Windows 10 and modern productivity applications.

The Modern, Agile Data Center is Here!

GPU live migration has been one of the most requested features since NVIDIA virtual GPU first came to market. Migration of virtual machines can take a few hours, with maintenance windows sometimes even spread out over the course of a month. And this does not even take into account the hours of planning and coordinating that IT has to undergo beforehand.

NVIDIA and Citrix have collaborated to help solve this problem. Migrating a VM that included GPU acceleration technology is a very difficult task to accomplish. Whereas a CPU only contains a few cores, the GPU contains thousands of cores. Live migration must replicate the GPU on one server to another server, and map its processes one to one, as well as copy the state of all active components in use. Using GPU live migration, organizations today can now ensure server health, improve IT agility, and boost disaster recovery. XenMotion support for GPU-accelerated VMs is available with Citrix XenServer 7.4, NVIDIA Tesla M10, M60, M6 and all Pascal architecture-based card, except P100.  Support for V100 will be available later in 2018.

“GPU live migration with NVIDIA virtual GPU and Citrix XenMotion completes the picture of the modern, agile data center, and has transformed the role of IT” says Anne Hecht, Sr. Director Product Marketing for NVIDIA virtual GPU solutions. “IT administrators can now manage at scale large VDI deployments, ease routine maintenance and ensure optimal resource utilization – all at their own time, without impact to end user productivity.”

And, here’s an early review I’d like to highlight.

“It’s a game changer. The Meltdown and Spectre BIOS came out one day, and the next day I was able to immediately make it a simple, during the workday, BIOS update. Normally this would be a 10-11 p.m. task on my own time,” says Jeremy Stroebel, IT director at Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf (BDMD)

Raise Productivity to a Whole New Level

The NVIDIA virtual GPU March 2018 release also addresses the need of high end professional graphics users with support for the Tesla V100 GPU with Quadro vDWS software. Improved performance enables designers and engineers to run real-time, interactive simulations; speed rendering time of photorealistic images; and leverage deep learning-enhanced applications. The software release also brings enhanced features for knowledge workers with NVIDIA GRID vPC, supporting multiple 4k resolution monitors and Linux OS, for an affordable and effective way to boost productivity.

Get Hands-On with NVIDIA Virtual GPU

If you are attending Citrix Synergy, drop by NVIDIA booth #301 to see how NVIDIA virtual GPU solutions can help propel your digital transformation efforts. See the industry’s only GPU live migration in action, experience a brilliant Windows 10 virtual desktop with NVIDIA GRID vPC, and witness the most powerful virtual workstation with NVIDIA Quadro vDWS. Talk to us one-on-one on how you can enable the modern digital workplace by scheduling a meeting today.