News

NVIDIA and VMware Announce Tech Preview of vMotion for GPU Live Migration

• By Wendy A. Hernandez
• 08/28/2018

This week at VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas, NVIDIA and VMware Inc. announced the release of a technology preview of vSphere vMotion for NVIDIA GPUs with VMware vSphere 6.7 update 1, with general availability expected later this year.

According to the announcement, users with access to the technology preview will be able to "use vMotion to live migrate NVIDIA vGPU-powered virtual desktops without end-user interruption and no data loss." This live migration capability will allow IT admins to "perform critical services like workload leveling, infrastructure resilience and server software upgrades without any VM downtime, when it's convenient for them."

"GPUs have revolutionized the way we work by enabling users to run virtualized AI-accelerated and deep learning-enhanced applications to modern productivity and collaboration applications," said Courtney Burry, vice president of product marketing for End-User Computing at VMware, in a prepared statement. "This makes VMware vSphere vMotion for NVIDIA vGPUs more relevant than ever, allowing IT to maximize end-user productivity and optimize infrastructure investment. This can help solve one of the most difficult challenges in the virtualization space."

Running NVIDIA GPUs in the datacenter can allow businesses to run multiple types of workloads and maximize datacenter utilization, "improving productivity and reducing costs," according to the announcement. With NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstation (Quadro vDWS) and NVIDIA GRID running on the same Tesla Volta and Pascal GPUs as deep learning, inferencing, training and HPC workloads, the NVIDIA GPUs can be repurposed to virtual GPUs to support VDI again.

NVIDIA is showcasing its virtualization solutions at VMworld 2018 at booth 1362, and according to the statement, the demos include:

• vMotion of GPU-accelerated VMs.
• Real-time interactive simulation on Ansys Discovery Live running on Quadro vDWS and Tesla GPUs to accelerate design cycles. Use these same GPUs at night to run large HPC workloads.
• AI-enhanced applications benefit professional applications and workflows (includes large-scale object detection).
• The digital workplace redefined with higher density in VDI environments.
• Advanced, AI-accelerated real-time ray-traced global illumination, shadows, ambient occlusion and reflections.