VMUG Leader Matt Heldstab joins me to talk about the VMUG EUC Explore event and community involvement.
Podcast music is a derivative of Boogie Woogie Bed by Jason Shaw (audionatix.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
When IT administrators think of GPUs, the first thing that comes to mind for many is gaming. But GPUs also have business applications. They’re mainly found in high end workstations to support graphics intensive applications like 3D CAD and medical imaging.
But GPUs will have other uses in the enterprise. Many of the emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and deep learning, utilize GPUs to perform compute operations. These will start finding their way into the data center, either as part of line-of-business applications or as part of IT operations tools. This could also allow the business to utilize GRID environments after hours for other forms of data processing.
This guide will show you how to build headless virtual machines that can take advantage of NVIDIA GRID vGPU for GPU compute and CUDA. In order to do this, you will need to have a Pascal Series NVIDIA Tesla card such as the P4, P40, or P100 and the GRID 5.0 drivers. The GRID components will also need to be configured in your hypervisor, and you will need to have the GRID drivers for Linux.
I’ll be using CentOS 7.x for this guide. My base CentOS configuration is a minimal install with no graphical shell and a few additional packages like Nano and Open VM Tools. I use Bob Planker’s guide for preparing my VM as a template.
The steps for setting up a headless CentOS VM with GRID are:
At this point, you have a headless VM with the NVIDIA Drivers and CUDA Toolkit installed. So what can you do with this? Just about anything that requires CUDA. You can experiment with deep learning frameworks like Tensorflow, build virtual render nodes for tools like Blender, or even use Matlab for GPU compute.
One of the defining features of the Nutanix platform is simplicity. Innovations like the Prism interface for infrastructure management and One-Click Upgrades for both the Nutanix software-defined storage platform and supported hypervisors have lowered the management burden of on-premises infrastructure.
Nutanix is now looking to bring that same level of simplicity to migrating virtual machines to a new hypervisor. Nutanix has released a new tool today called Xtract for VM. This tool, which is free to all Nutanix customers, brings the same one-click simplicity that Nutanix is known for to migrating workloads from ESXi to AHV.
So how does Xtract for VM differentiate from other migration tools? First, it is an agentless migration tool. Xtract will communicate with vCenter to get a list of VMs that are in the ESXi infrastructure, and it will build a migration plan and synchronize the VM data from ESXi to AHV.
During data synchronization and migration, Xtract will insert the AHV device drivers into the virtual machine. It will also capture and preserve the network configuration, so the VM will not lose connectivity or require administrator intervention after the migration is complete.
By injecting the AHV drivers and preserving the network configuration during the data synchronization and cutover, Xtract is able to perform cross-hypervisor migrations with minimal downtime. And since the original VM is not touched during the migration, rollback is as easy as shutting down the AHV VM and powering the ESXi VM back on, which significantly reduces the risk of cross-hypervisor migrations.
The datacenter is clearly changing, and we now live in a multi-hypervisor world. While many customers will still run VMware for their on-premises environments, there are many that are looking to reduce their spend on hypervisor products. Xtract for VMs provides a tool to help reduce that cost while providing the simplicity that Nutanix is known for.
While Xtract is currently version 1.0, I can see this technology be a pivotal for helping customers move workloads between on-premises and cloud infrastructures.
To learn more about this new tool, you can check out the Xtract for VMs page on Nutanix’s webpage.
I’ve been blogging now for about seven or so years, and The Virtual Horizon has existed in it’s current form for about two or three years.
So what’s next? Besides for more blogging, that is…
It’s time to go multimedia. In the next few weeks, I will be launching The Virtual Horizon Podcast. The podcast will only partially focus on the latest in end-user computing, and I hope to cover other topics such as career development, community involvement, and even other technologies that exist outside of the EUC space.
I’m still working out some of the logistics and workflow, but the first episode has already been recorded. It should post in the next couple of weeks.
So keep an eye out here. I’ll be adding a new section to the page once we’re a bit closer to go-live.
The Virtual Horizon 
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