As hardware costs rise, organizations and IT professionals need solutions to maximize resources and minimize costs – all without sacrificing user experience. This can be a tall order when your users are graphics-heavy power users whose hardware requirements come with a 4-figure price tag. Making the most of every GPU is priority number one, and often, dedicated hardware for every single virtual machine just isn’t feasible.
VMware’s VMotion technology is the secret ingredient for maximizing GPU utilization for graphics-intense virtual machines. By migrating machines, pooled resources can be optimized to maximize hardware utilization, flexibility, and availability. The technology is nothing short of magic – it works by encapsulating the entire state of a virtual machine into a set of files. By leveraging VMware’s clustered Virtual Machine File System, the files are stored on shared storage of multiple ESX server installations. The active memory and precise execution state is transferred over a high-speed network which allows the VM to instantly switch from running on the source ESX server to the destination ESX server. This move is instantaneous and imperceptible to users – that means zero downtime!
What this means is, IT professionals can overprovision machines with graphics-intense resources onto any ESX server installation. If GPUs are maxed out on that particular host when a user requests their VM, simply VMotion over to another ESX server installation with available GPU. This cuts down significantly on hardware costs as you only need enough GPU capacity to satisfy as many VMs as you will be running simultaneously. This is big news for your bottom line.
As of now, the command to VMotion must be executed manually within your VMware environment after login. However, using the Leostream Connection Broker as a single pane of glass management layer on top of your VMWare environment, Leostream does all the thinking for you. When a user logs in through Leostream, the Connection Broker automatically assesses the resources required by the requested virtual machine and, if needed, VMotions the machine to a host with available GPU.
VMware’s VMotion is the key to maximizing hardware utilization and, combined with the Leostream Connection Broker, is a seamless user experience.