The Importance of Virtual GPU Technology
GPU technology has been widely used in physical desktops, to reduce the load on the CPU and to provide a better experience for users - for application rendering, video playback, other graphics-intensive workloads. Virtual GPU technology now allows virtual machines to use GPU resources configured on the physical servers. Not only does this ensure that VMs can use GPU instead of CPU resources, it also provides users with a better experience and more users can be supported because of the reduced CPU consumption.
NVIDIA has led the way in virtualized GPU processing with integrated hardware and software solutions that offer organizations many options for graphics processing deployment and smart management of GPU resource allocation.
“eG Enterprise is something we can't live without. We have been able to use eG Enterprise to quantify performance improvements in areas that we were struggling with before, and with a few changes we were able to quickly see that we had a 50% improvement in Citrix user login times.”
Wendy Howard
Infrastructure Engineer, St. Charles Health System
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Monitoring Virtual GPU Technology
GPU technology improves the performance of virtual desktops and applications, but to reap the full benefits of an immersive user experience at scale, organizations need a complete lifecycle of managing the user experience - from designing infrastructure, to managing and optimizing a production environment, to responding to user issues dynamically, in real-time.
eG Innovations in partnership with NVIDIA delivers comprehensive monitoring capabilities that enable IT to better manage all aspects of the user experience, tapping into new GPU-sourced insights that aid in design, right-sizing, proactive infrastructure optimization and help desk issue remediation. This new joint solution integrates eG Enterprise with NVIDIA GRID software to provide actionable insights through host-level, guest-level, and application-level analytics. eG Enterprise supports GPU monitoring for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and for VMware Horizon VDI and RDSH environments.
Comprehensive virtual GPU monitoring - at all levels - with eG Enterprise
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Efficient Troubleshooting of GPU Performance for Virtual Apps and Desktops
eG Enterprise supports GPU monitoring for NVIDIA K1 and K2 Grids installed on VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer Hypervisor. GPU monitoring for Citrix virtual apps and desktops and VMware Horizon is supported.
- Using NVIDIA API, it collects GPU metrics. Both Shared and Pass-through modes of GPU provisioning are supported.
- GPU metrics are reported at the hypervisor-level and VM-level for Shared mode, and at VM-level for Pass-through mode.
- Usage of GPU resources is tracked at the hypervisor level and the VM level. VMs and applications consuming excessive GPU resources are identified.
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Monitors All Aspects of vGPU Performance
Measuring CPU utilization alone is not enough for graphic-intensive application workloads. Administrators need track different aspects of vGPU performance:
- What is the speed at which the GPU operates and is there any deviation from baseline performance?
- Is there any shortage of frame buffer that can impact screen resolution, color level and refresh speed?
- Does the vGPU have sufficient BAR1 memory?
- Which group of users is utilizing GPU resources?
- Is there a need for additional GPU capacity?
- If a VM is taking a lot of GPU resources, which application is responsible for this?
- Are there passthrough VMs that are not using vGPU allocated to them?
- Can the user load be balanced to better utilize available resources?

Benefits
- Easily uncover the reason why graphics and HD content delivered via VDI are slow, lagging, and jittery: is it due to inadequate GPU resources on the host or due to excessive utilization of GPU capacity by a few VMs
- Helpdesk staff can identify GPU problems before involving Citrix or VMware admins
- Single pane of glass: Benefit from unified monitoring of NVIDIA GPU alongside the entire VDI infrastructure
- Be the first to know when GPU cards will run out of memory, and plan wisely for expansion
Why eG? One Monitor to Manage All of IT.
- eG Enterprise is the only single pane-of-glass, virtualization-aware, auto-diagnostic IT infrastructure performance monitor
- Gain actionable answers to performance issues, wherever they originate, from application code to bare metal
- Understand the impact of infrastructure issues on application performance and user experience
- Unify IT performance monitoring, alerting, diagnosing, reporting, and capacity planning in a single console
- Ensure a great user experience and dramatically improve IT efficiency
- Benefit from flexible deployment options (on-premises and SaaS) and IT monitoring approaches (agentless and agent-based)