Not opposed to this, I'm not a private company though, we're (my organization) government so it doesn't move as quickly with approvals. I know that seems like a deflection, more transparency. We currently have a commitment with Citrix/XenServer as part of their new licensing model to run all my other Citrix technology and I'm investigating alternatives to allow for the cards to operate effectively. Our new servers will hold over (just because they are faster) our end users while we evaluate. It's not like they can't do their work, just some things take a bit to render on their VDI than those running physical machines. We've even contemplated, like those that posted earlier, going away from VDI, but it still seems to be the best solution for what we do and the limited technicians we have on staff. We've been all in with Citrix for years.

Not sure if I could post a link, but here is the info on their Flex line of datacenter GPUs.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/discrete-gpus/data-center-gpu/flex-series.html

I can't comment on longevity but at least it's still their newest line in that market. I'd also add (opinion) that as budgets get tighter and they get more support from hypervisor/vendors it can only strengthen their position. I apologize for continuing to name drop, but VMWare and NVidia's licensing costs put us in a bad way. This was/is our one shot to be able to offer the same and possibly better experience at a price point we could handle. If I can't get a solution to utilize them properly I've not burned much with the incentives I received at the end of last year for our server purchase, but if I can it checks all the boxes. I would bet it may sway others to step away from the more expensive offerings as well. Looking at stock prices for VMWare and then offerings like Nutanix it would appear that it already has.

These are them currently. There's a more powerful version the Flex 170 that's the same thing but for more graphics intensive workloads. It has less SR-IOV channels, faster GPUs, requires more power and more video RAM but its purpose, although VDI, is for your CAD type users. Same line though you can still buy them now and they are Intel's all in for VDI GPUs currently to cut away at NVidia's market. They don't offer licensing to utilize the shared GPU. It's why I made the investment. I literally got mine in our new Cisco UCS C240 M7 servers in January so they're definitely still selling/including them in server hardware. They also offer a MAX 1500 series but that's to utilze the GPU computations like crypto-mining or programs that run utilizing GPU for faster computations. They weren't designed with VDI in mind.

Absolutely, I completely understand what you are getting at/saying. I was just adding a little more info figuring it couldn't hurt. I appreciate you taking the time to even address and go the lengths of getting a card to test with. To be addressed by the CEO/co-founder is pretty amazing and I'm honored to even get traction. Thank you again!

Yes that is correct. It's their low power 75 watt solution that allows (if I'm not mistaken) 63 SR-IOV instances per card. I acquired them as part of an end of year promotion 2 per server so I could eventually run up to 120 VDI instances per server with shared GPU. Again, we don't game, but many of our apps are internet based and especially those like maps (just viewing) and some others that have forms benefit from the GPU acceleration. Even a 5+ year old Celeron with internal graphics beats our VMs in that instance. This would level the playing field and make the user experience the same as a full desktop in all things. Thank you for considering this and assisting. I know Proxmox has it working well SR-IOV from what I've read. Hyper-V you have to fiddle with power management but it also works SR-IOV and VMWare was probably first to adopt it. The white paper/partnership between Citrix, Cisco, and Intel actually goes through how to set it up on VMware to work with VDA 2311 and higher. That may not mean much to the people reading this but I find it a little ironic that their setup/partnership with Cisco/Intel would lead to them utilizing VMWare instead of XenServer.

@olivierlambert

Mine came from Cisco as part of the new UCS Servers I purchased the C240 M7's. I know Dell sells them. I'm from the states so I'm not 100% sure they do so in Europe, meaning Dell or if they have a EU division. Lenovo has it available as well based off my reading. Since you're doing it in the name of bettering the industry you'd think that Intel or one of the hardware juggernauts would want to get one in your hands. Dare I say maybe eBay?

@olivierlambert

Yes I believe that is a possibility. I make an assumption when you have completed your work the card would be returned to me? They are less expensive than others of this kind, but still have a higher price tag than a typical gaming card to the tune of 4 figures.

I know this is 3 months old, but it is still relevant to my organization, and I'd have to believe others (we can't be the only one). We've been a XenServer/Citrix Hypervisor user for years. We're a Citrix/MS shop so it made sense to utilize their hypervisor. We were going to go with VMWare prior to Broadcom this year (or next), but with VMWare's licensing model we really couldn't afford their top-of-the-line edition, per core (at least there was a chance per socket) that is needed to facilitate SR-IOV for GPUs. On top of that NVidia requires licensing as well for the use of their GPUs in this way.

The Intel Flex is a great solution because there is no licensing and they allow 60+ SR-IOV sessions for their not as potent 75-watt Flex 140 card which is perfect for general applications and anything web based. Not to mention they are less expensive overall than their NVidia counterparts. Our VDI environment doesn't run anything real graphics intensive like CAD this is strictly to render web-gl based applications in a more efficient way like our own internal web map that wasn't an issue until we upgraded our ESRI version. I'd very much appreciate this feature being incorporated in if possible mainstream. In reading above I'm strictly talking about SR-IOV and not some other method of GPU sharing if that does indeed make it easier to facilitate. It would certainly improve our user experience and environment efficiencies. So a +1 from me to add the feature in one of your future releases if you are considering it.