Guest post by Justin Boitano, General Manager of Cloud and Virtualization Solutions at NVIDIA
Today at our annual GPU Technology Conference, NVIDIA jointly with VMware announced the availability of NVIDIA GRID on the VMware Horizon DaaS platform. The combination is an industry breakthrough, providing rich graphics performance on DaaS for the first time – unlocking the full potential of desktop virtualization and making it a viable option for even the most demanding graphics users. This is exciting because with VMware’s leadership in the space, this opens opportunities for an entirely new audience of end-users — from office workers using productivity applications and viewing multimedia — to power users in engineering and design.
Cloud services are transforming the industry, and VMware’s acquisition of Desktone highlights the stakes involved in building best in class solutions and winning new customers quickly. Old versions of VDI from a few years ago compromised the visual and interactive experience for users by delivering desktops and apps without a GPU – a key tool within any modern workstation, notebook, laptop, tablet and smartphone. As a result many users – particularly those running graphics-intensive applications – preferred more powerful and reliable physical systems. With NVIDIA GRID, VMware Horizon DaaS users can now, for the first time, experience even the most demanding graphics-intensive applications virtually, through any connected device, while seamlessly shifting from private to public clouds.
This is the way of the future for power users in engineering and design, who until now haven’t been able to access the graphics power they need unless they’re on a dedicated desktop PCs or workstations. Now, these power users can achieve the same flexibility as the rest of the enterprise – working on the go, on the device of their choice, without compromising performance. The increased productivity is clear – users can make design changes in the field, collaborate with other team members on the fly, and more. Enterprises can also easily manage costs by eliminating expensive hardware and upkeep in favor of running virtual machines.
And it’s not just the power users who will see the benefits of GRID. VMware Horizon DaaS with NVIDIA GRID opens up opportunities for an entirely new set of users. Everyone across the enterprise benefits from better graphics performance – whether you’re viewing multimedia, working in Microsoft Office, or even just browsing the web.
NVIDIA and VMware are continuing to collaborate and design new ways to bring the benefits of GRID to all VMware solutions. One of these ways is to let VMware virtual machine users leverage GRID’s advanced virtual GPU technology (vGPU) for GPU sharing multiple across virtual desktops – enabling up to eight concurrent users per GPU for even greater cost-efficiency for enterprises. You can expect to hear more from us on this later in the year.
