Configuring Tesla M60 cards for NVIDIA GRID vGPU

by Sep 17, 2018NVIDIA GRID

There are a couple of steps which need to be taken to configure the Tesla M60 cards with NVIDIA GRID VGPU in a vSphere / Horizon environment. I have listed them here quick and dirty. They are an extract of the NVIDIA Virtual GPU Software User Guide.

On the host(s):

  1. Install the vib
esxcli software vib install -v directory/NVIDIA-vGPUVMware_ESXi_6.0_Host_Driver_390.72-1OEM.600.0.0.2159203.vib

  1. Reboot the host(s)
  2. Check if the module is loaded
vmkload_mod -l | grep nvidia

  1. Run the nvidia-smi command to verify the correct communication with the device
nvidia-smi

  1. Configure Suspend and Resume for VMware vSphere
esxcli system module parameters set -m nvidia -p “NVreg_RegistryDwords=RMEnableVgpuMigration=1”

  1. Reboot the host(s)
  2. Confirm that suspend and resume is configured
dmesg | grep NVRM

  1. Check that the default graphics type is set to shared direct
  2. If the graphics type were not set to shared direct, execute the following commands to stop and start the xorg and nv-hostengine services
/etc/init.d/xorg stop
nv-hostengine -t
nv-hostengine -d
/etc/init.d/xorg start

On the VM / Parent VM:

  1. Configure the VM, beware that once the vGPU is configured that the console of the VM will not be visible/accessible through the vSphere Client. An alternate access method should already be foreseen, e.g. RDP access
  2. Edit the VM configuration to add a shared pci device, verify that NVIDIA GRID vGPU is selected
  3. Choose the vGPU profile
    more info on the profiles can be found here under section ‘1.4.1 Virtual GPU Types’: https://docs.nvidia.com/grid/6.0/grid-vgpu-user-guide/index.html
  4. Reserve all guest memory

On the Horizon pool:

  1. Configure the pool to use the NVIDIA GRID vGPU as 3D Renderer

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