Project Description

Design and deploy a new cluster of VMware vSphere ESXi servers to an existing datacenter that provide dedicated graphics hardware acceleration to virtual machine systems.

Details

The client had a software application that required the installation of Nvidia graphics display drivers on a virtual machine. The problem was that a physical Nvidia display adapter card was required to install and run the Nvidia software. Typically, virtual machines have a virtual VMware SVGA 3D display adapter.

Several different architectural design options were evaluated. The final solution chosen was to deploy a new cluster of VMware ESXI servers that included vDGA capability. The virtual machines requiring vDGA would run on this new cluster. Users would access these virtual machines using either Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection application or OpenText’s Exceed On Demand application.

To deploy vDGA, the client also needed to update their VMware infrastructure from VMware vSphere 5.0 to 5.5. This required updating their vCenter servers, vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) servers, and the vSphere client application from 5.0 to 5.5. The vDGA virtual machines also needed to be updated to version 9.

Technologies

Results

The project was completed on time and within budget.