We are a CAD shop and we have tested vSGA and vDGA graphics acceleration with Horizon View 5.3. We are running Cisco UCS C240-M3 ESXi 5.1 U1 hosts with Nvidia K2 grid GPU cards. We are using Wyse P25 thin clients and love the performance we get with the hardware PCoIP provided by the Teradici chip and the vDGA GPU pass-thru capability now available with ESXi and View 5.3, but the fixed 1:1 relationship of VMs to GPUs is just not cost effective. We tried the vSGA shared model, but our most used apps used DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.3, which are not supported in vSGA. The vSGA mode is really only useful for improving "normal" desktop users performance in a virtual desktop environment, for things like Office and web browsing and such, and not for any current generation CAD applications.
Any plans of a hybrid solution between these two modes? We really need the performance & compatibility that vDGA provides in the shared model that vSGA provides. Is this coming, and if so, how soon? We understand Citrix is already doing something like this and are considering switching platforms, but we really don't want to unless we have to.
- Chris