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KillHour
Oct 28, 2007


If you want to be lavished with coke and strippers, you want to be in sales. IME, Cisco sales is pretty over the top.

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Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

Sales people have huge expense accounts. Once you're in charge of spend for an IT company with a spend of > $1MM you get treated very differently. At my last company we had an annual hardware spend each with Dell and IBM and it was always an Event when their sales team came to the office.

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


Home Lab:

I presently run an ESXi6 free license system with 32GB ram, a 45-watt TDP Xeon . It does a few game servers, VPN/firewall with PFsense, has Mint virtual desktops with X2Go, DNS/DCHP, freenas, etc etc etc it's just for dicking around.

I've had some success with a Pi2 as a PCoIP client.
http://rpitc.blogspot.com/
Interestingly, it looks like this project's HDX ICA client is capable of using the h.264 hardware decoder of a Pi2.

The Goal: Can I make the Pi a "media center" (yes, I've used XMBC before, so I know that the SIMPLEST solution already exists) by basically just using it as a thin client attaching to a Windows 7/10 desktop with vSGA / vDGA / RemoteFX / Whatever Xen does? I use GRID K2s with Horizon in my workplace to serve desktops at great licensing expense. Holy gently caress do we pay some goddamn licensing fees.

Roadblocks I see so far:
-The virtual hardware of RemoteFX is available only to Win7/8.1 Enterprise guests. Volume licensing only. Welp.
-ESXi is not able, so far as I am aware, to actually send video to a remote thin client w/o Horizon. My understanding is that, while you can certainly just map a PCIe device to any old VM in ESXi free edition, the video output of the graphics card mapped in this manner still goes out via the card's DVI/HDMI/DP ports.

So, probably no MS or VMware stack. Xen?

https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2011/02/04/virtually-everything-you-need-to-set-up-and-use-vdi-for-free/

The link describes a stack involving an arbitrary hypervisor layer with a free edition of XenDesktop serving Windows OS. I'm already just about convinced to move to Xen professionally and at home as VMware is both starting to slide behind on development and charge positively insane licensing fees, so hey, this could all end up becoming a learning experience. It looks like the free Express product level has been removed, but hey, a $98 one-time purchase for a perpetual license seat for XenDesktop isn't that bad if you aren't poor.


The inspiration for this was a new client who needed to do something very stupid with a Frankenstein's monster of an ancient, mangled, poorly-managed "server." I want to try doing this right.

DevNull
Apr 4, 2007

And sometimes is seen a strange spot in the sky
A human being that was given to fly

Potato Salad posted:

-ESXi is not able, so far as I am aware, to actually send video to a remote thin client w/o Horizon. My understanding is that, while you can certainly just map a PCIe device to any old VM in ESXi free edition, the video output of the graphics card mapped in this manner still goes out via the card's DVI/HDMI/DP ports.

You can do this without Horizon, but using the Pi makes it a bit more of a problem. On the ESX box, you can use the Remote Console or enable the VNC port for the VM. If you used the VMware VNC Client, https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vnc-server-and-vnc-client, you would actually get pretty good performance. The only problem is we don't have the client/server built for ARM, so you would have to use another VNC client that won't use all of our improvements to VNC. If you wanted to try something like a MinnowBoard, that might be an option. I don't know anything about them though, do they run normal versions of Linux? I remember running into library issues on my Pi when I was playing it.

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


DevNull posted:

You can do this without Horizon, but using the Pi makes it a bit more of a problem. On the ESX box, you can use the Remote Console or enable the VNC port for the VM. If you used the VMware VNC Client, https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vnc-server-and-vnc-client, you would actually get pretty good performance. The only problem is we don't have the client/server built for ARM, so you would have to use another VNC client that won't use all of our improvements to VNC. If you wanted to try something like a MinnowBoard, that might be an option. I don't know anything about them though, do they run normal versions of Linux? I remember running into library issues on my Pi when I was playing it.

I've been using VMware VNC clients since you posted it ages ago :D its solid loving win.

You can access the graphics of a graphics card without a locally-attached dvi/vga/dp/hdmi without Horizon? What is the technology name I'm looking for, then?

E: I'm guessing this is along the lines of "break pci interface into two channels, use half for commands in and part of the other half for video back to the vm?"

Gothmog1065
May 14, 2009
Hey guys, a question.

I'm playing with Linux on my ESXi server (6.0), and want to test things and get things like my sound to work over a remote desktop. Right now I'm just opening a console terminal via vSphere client, but I would like to test sound and some video formats as I mess with Linux. What is the best way to accomplish this?

The host I'm remoting from is Windows 10, and I'm remoting into a Ubuntu 14.

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


Use DevNull's project above. It's an optimized VNC client.

DevNull
Apr 4, 2007

And sometimes is seen a strange spot in the sky
A human being that was given to fly

Potato Salad posted:

I've been using VMware VNC clients since you posted it ages ago :D its solid loving win.

You can access the graphics of a graphics card without a locally-attached dvi/vga/dp/hdmi without Horizon? What is the technology name I'm looking for, then?

E: I'm guessing this is along the lines of "break pci interface into two channels, use half for commands in and part of the other half for video back to the vm?"

Horizon never does any of the graphics work. It is all handled by ESX, and the engineering of it is done by the core virtualization team at VMware. The only thing Horizon does is scrape the screen and send it over a network socket.

I don't know how to setup the mediated pass though stuff, but if you are doing the vSGA (virtualized graphics) you just have to install the vib and enable 3D graphics for the VM that you want. If you don't have the opening in the WebUI or whatever, you can just put "mks.enable3d = TRUE" in the vmx. That makes it so the svga device in the VM is given 3d capabilities. Any 3d rendering is really just rendering into memory that we are treating as the frame buffer for the guest. If you enable VNC, or connect a remote console, we just read that memory and send it over the network. If you are using View, that memory gets copied back into the guest, then gets sent over the network. Yes, the architecture requires an extra memory copy for View. It is stupid. If you enable the VNC port and attach to it, you don't get all the other View stuff but the graphics rendering capability is the same.

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


I'm trying to find something that says vSGA requires a license and doesn't work on ESXi 6 free edition. So far so good.

I'll try this.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.
I know it's very early and these things aren't in many people's hands yet, but has anyone gotten to play with AMD's S-series vGPUs yet? The licensing on nVidia's GRID 2.0 poo poo (on top of Horizon!) has gotten completely out of hand and any alternative, even an AMD one, is a great thing to look at.

DevNull
Apr 4, 2007

And sometimes is seen a strange spot in the sky
A human being that was given to fly

Vulture Culture posted:

I know it's very early and these things aren't in many people's hands yet, but has anyone gotten to play with AMD's S-series vGPUs yet? The licensing on nVidia's GRID 2.0 poo poo (on top of Horizon!) has gotten completely out of hand and any alternative, even an AMD one, is a great thing to look at.

What is the deal with the licensing on nVidia? I haven't been paying attention to the graphics side of things as much since I left that team. We didn't actually to the nVidia stuff, others from the virtualization team worked on it. We didn't want that mess, because we know nVidia was going to be bad news eventually.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

DevNull posted:

What is the deal with the licensing on nVidia? I haven't been paying attention to the graphics side of things as much since I left that team. We didn't actually to the nVidia stuff, others from the virtualization team worked on it. We didn't want that mess, because we know nVidia was going to be bad news eventually.
Here's a summary of what they outlined at VMworld back in September:

http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/ga...world-2015.aspx

The support tiers are even named Basic and Production to align with VMware's stuff :(

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!

Vulture Culture posted:

I know it's very early and these things aren't in many people's hands yet, but has anyone gotten to play with AMD's S-series vGPUs yet?
Are these already the cards with SR-IOV?

--edit: Yeah, they are. And no outputs on the card itself. So much for my idea of running two OSes, both with hardware accelerated graphics and high framerates.

Combat Pretzel fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Feb 9, 2016

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl
GRID cards also have no outputs. Patience will have this trickle down a bit.

Combat Pretzel
Jun 23, 2004

No, seriously... what kurds?!
Hopefully. I'd like a card of theirs with four outputs, to drive two displays with two different OSes.

On semi-related notes, browsing the KVM devel mailing list, it seems like NVIDIA is pushing for some vendor-neutral(!) vGPU specific stuff in vfio. I wonder if that'll be about more than their GRID cards.

DevNull
Apr 4, 2007

And sometimes is seen a strange spot in the sky
A human being that was given to fly

Vulture Culture posted:

Here's a summary of what they outlined at VMworld back in September:

http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/ga...world-2015.aspx

The support tiers are even named Basic and Production to align with VMware's stuff :(

Wow, that is a mess. A lot of us knew that nVidia would start trying to latch on to customers in bad ways as the lose market in other areas. I really hope Intel keeps pushing graphics forward. They are busy looking for things to throw on their chips, and graphics makes a lot of sense. Their newer stuff on lower end chips is actually looking pretty good these days. A few years ago we demoed a bunch of virtualized graphics on Fusion just using the HD5000 of a macbook air. It was doing pretty drat good.

Mierdaan
Sep 14, 2004

Pillbug
Sweet Jesus, why is VMware's KB so bad? I swear there's about a 95% chance, any time I click on a kb.vmware.com link, that this will be the result:

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


Vulture Culture posted:

I know it's very early and these things aren't in many people's hands yet, but has anyone gotten to play with AMD's S-series vGPUs yet? The licensing on nVidia's GRID 2.0 poo poo (on top of Horizon!) has gotten completely out of hand and any alternative, even an AMD one, is a great thing to look at.

"Hi, we at Nvidia are aware of the fact that we are and have been on the top of the x84/64 graphics dogpile for a long time now and that we're highly desirable, so as an added bonus atop our existing premium, here's licensing that costs more than the cards of our competitor."

https://www.cdwg.com/shop/products/NVIDIA-Grid-Virtual-Workstation-Extended-license/3879631.aspx

License Category: License
License Qty: 1 concurrent user connection
License Type: License

Uh, no. I'll take the 32-user FirePro cards, thanks. We're already talking about backing out of GRID in the next cycle of our Horizon environment as the licensing is hilarious, ridiculous, ridiculously hilarious, and hilariously ridiculous.

vanity slug
Jul 20, 2010

Mierdaan posted:

Sweet Jesus, why is VMware's KB so bad? I swear there's about a 95% chance, any time I click on a kb.vmware.com link, that this will be the result:



Hey, at least it isn't Symantec. Or Microsoft. Or HP. In fact I think it's industry standard to have a completely hosed up knowledge base.

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl

Potato Salad posted:

"Hi, we at Nvidia are aware of the fact that we are and have been on the top of the x84/64 graphics dogpile for a long time now and that we're highly desirable, so as an added bonus atop our existing premium, here's licensing that costs more than the cards of our competitor."

nvidia.txt

Every time you question their stupid decisions, just remember how many ex-SGI employees are in power there.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Potato Salad posted:

"Hi, we at Nvidia are aware of the fact that we are and have been on the top of the x84/64 graphics dogpile for a long time now and that we're highly desirable, so as an added bonus atop our existing premium, here's licensing that costs more than the cards of our competitor."

https://www.cdwg.com/shop/products/NVIDIA-Grid-Virtual-Workstation-Extended-license/3879631.aspx

License Category: License
License Qty: 1 concurrent user connection
License Type: License

Uh, no. I'll take the 32-user FirePro cards, thanks. We're already talking about backing out of GRID in the next cycle of our Horizon environment as the licensing is hilarious, ridiculous, ridiculously hilarious, and hilariously ridiculous.
That license is for Virtual Workstation Extended, which includes OpenCL, CUDA, and a bunch of other stuff. The Virtual PC license is like $250-275 which is still about 8 times too much money

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Mierdaan posted:

Sweet Jesus, why is VMware's KB so bad? I swear there's about a 95% chance, any time I click on a kb.vmware.com link, that this will be the result:



Clear you cookies / temp cache. Bit me too and it's been mentioned a bunch of times in the thread. I guess VMware laid off their Web team as well. Can the last one out turn off the lights?

Erwin
Feb 17, 2006

Internet Explorer posted:

Clear you cookies / temp cache. Bit me too and it's been mentioned a bunch of times in the thread. I guess VMware laid off their Web team as well. Can the last one out turn off the lights?

For sites where clearing cookies solves issues, I usually right-click -> open in incognito mode from the Google results. Works to bypass the Live login screen on msdn too.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


Holy gently caress is it annoying to click something that looks relevant on the MS support pages and be asked to authenticate with your Live ID to get in. Thanks for the tip.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.
Will the "Private to my Mac" networking option in VMware Fusion prevent DHCP in a virtual machine from leaking out to my physical network, or will I need to firewall one of my vmnet devices with pf?

Pile Of Garbage
May 28, 2007



Vulture Culture posted:

Will the "Private to my Mac" networking option in VMware Fusion prevent DHCP in a virtual machine from leaking out to my physical network, or will I need to firewall one of my vmnet devices with pf?

"Private to my Mac" will prevent a VM from seeing DHCP discovers. More info: https://pubs.vmware.com/fusion-5/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.fusion.help.doc%2FGUID-84AC2D7D-4A44-4AB6-BAF8-F12C55E71A2F.html

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.
Heh, thanks for that. A dedicated vmnet device seems to be working fine.

Wicaeed
Feb 8, 2005
:psyduck:

https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsphere/VMware-vSphere-vSOM-Pricing-FAQs.pdf

What did VMware just do?

Hadlock
Nov 9, 2004

I think Dell is trying to recoup some of their purchase cost

HPL
Aug 28, 2002

Worst case scenario.
Time to get my RHEL cert.

DevNull
Apr 4, 2007

And sometimes is seen a strange spot in the sky
A human being that was given to fly

Hadlock posted:

I think Dell is trying to recoup some of their purchase cost

I'm not familiar with the licensing, is that a huge bump in price?

The whole Dell deal hasn't gone though yet, so you can't really blame Dell. Any stupidity is firmly on the shoulders of VMware.

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

It's not a huge price bump, no. And the consolidated licensing isn't a bad thing, there are too many VSphere versions out there currently.

KillHour
Oct 28, 2007


DevNull posted:

I'm not familiar with the licensing, is that a huge bump in price?

The whole Dell deal hasn't gone though yet, so you can't really blame Dell. Any stupidity is firmly on the shoulders of VMware.

The old price is listed in there as well. It's not terrible.

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer
Maybe I missed something, but I think you can no longer buy enterprise, instead you would have to buy enterprise plus. The prices quoted in the PDF are for enterprise plus.

DevNull
Apr 4, 2007

And sometimes is seen a strange spot in the sky
A human being that was given to fly

adorai posted:

Maybe I missed something, but I think you can no longer buy enterprise, instead you would have to buy enterprise plus. The prices quoted in the PDF are for enterprise plus.

Yeah, it might be removing some buying options at the lower end and the middle range. Hopefully it doesn't screw people too much.

in a well actually
Jan 26, 2011

dude, you gotta end it on the rhyme

The Enterprise / Enterprise Plus distinction has been bullshit since they rolled it out but lol at charging for the E+ upgrade.

GobiasIndustries
Dec 14, 2007

Lipstick Apathy
Intel is the go-to for VMware NICs right? Was thinking of buying this for my home lab since it isn't too much more expensive than a 2-port: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002B8CJVC

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

GobiasIndustries posted:

Intel is the go-to for VMware NICs right? Was thinking of buying this for my home lab since it isn't too much more expensive than a 2-port: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002B8CJVC

That should do the trick nicely.

Pile Of Garbage
May 28, 2007



GobiasIndustries posted:

Intel is the go-to for VMware NICs right? Was thinking of buying this for my home lab since it isn't too much more expensive than a 2-port: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002B8CJVC

I've been looking at the VMware HCL and it's a tad confusing for those Intel PT NICs. Some support all versions up to ESXi 6.0u1 whilst others only support much earlier versions. I would post a link to the specific page on the HCL but VMware's site is terrible and don't provide a permalink for searches. So just head over to https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=io, enter "Intel PRO/1000 PT" (Including quotes) into the Keyword box and hit the Update button.

IMO if you want to be on the safe side you can get an Intel I350-T4 NIC which has full support all the way up to ESXi 6.0u1. Unfortunately it is pricier than the PT NIC: http://www.amazon.com/Intel-Etherne...6GE2E98H96E8FQ2

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HPL
Aug 28, 2002

Worst case scenario.
Kind of on the crazy train here, but I was thinking: USB passthrough is easy, PCI passthrough can be dodgy. What about passing through USB to a USB docking station with USB ports and video ports built in?

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