vGPU XenMotion is now a fully supported feature, unique to Citrix and NVIDIA, further confirming XenServer’s position as the leading hypervisor for graphics virtualization.
The live migration of virtual machines has been around for years from most hypervisors. However, giving access to a slice of real hardware meant that you never had the ability to live migrate a VM with a GPU attached. Previously, without vGPU XenMotion, administration was challenging. If you needed to redistribute virtual GPU-enabled VMs during working hours due to host performance or unexpected maintenance, you would have to ask the users to save their work, close their applications, and log out. That’s disruptive to your employees’ productivity.
Now, we’ve changed all that. Following a successful technology preview program, today marks a milestone both in Citrix leadership in supporting GPU virtualization capabilities and our longstanding relationship with NVIDIA. Now — only with Citrix XenServer and NVIDIA virtual GPU solutions — you can live migrate running VMs between hosts without any downtime using vGPU XenMotion, the industry’s first live migration solution for vGPU-enabled VMs. It improves employees’ productivity and IT staff’s agility in administering the environment.
vGPU XenMotion is fully supported with Citrix XenServer 7.4 and NVIDIA virtualization software, including (NVIDIA GRID and Quadro vDWS) running on NVIDIA Maxwell and Pascal GPUs.
Citrix and NVIDIA joint customer, Jeremy Stroebel, IT Director, Browning Day Mullins Dierdorf, got his hands on the tech preview of vGPU XenMotion and found out just how useful it could be. Jeremy was eager to patch his hosts’ BIOS, as soon as the hardware vendor released security fixes for the Spectre/Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities. Here is what he said:
“vGPU XenMotion made patching my hosts for Spectre/Meltdown a simple, during-working-hours update, which would have normally been a 10-11 PM task on my own time.”
If you’re attending NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) this week in Silicon Valley, check out Jeremy’s breakout session to learn more about his story of delivering graphic-accelerated desktops with Citrix and NVIDIA. Check out the vGPU XenMotion demo below.
As a leader in virtual graphics capabilities, it’s no surprise that customers such as Dallara, Aston Martin Red Bull Racing, Nissan, and Daewoo Ship Building entrust mission-critical graphical workloads to XenDesktop on XenServer. And with today’s news, they’ll be able to maintain their hosts with zero impact to those workloads!
Because XenServer is an entitlement with every edition of XenApp and XenDesktop, you get cost savings compared to using other vendors’ hypervisors. And with NVIDIA GPUs in your XenApp and XenDesktop deployment you can deliver the highest possible level of graphics performance to your employees while improving infrastructure utilization and simplifying IT manageability. XenServer is also an entitlement of the Citrix Cloud XenApp and XenDesktop Service – enabling you to deliver graphics-accelerated virtual apps and desktops from on-premises resource locations while benefiting from the simplicity of Citrix Cloud.
To learn more about vGPU XenMotion, check out the announcement from NVIDIA, and visit the XenServer product pages. To try out all the features of XenServer Enterprise Edition, simply request a free 90-day trial.
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