VDI Options | Post VMware Roadmap / Decisions

[vasquezmi]

I am looking to understand the roadmap as well as options in our current VE setting (8.1.3).
There are limited resources in PVE for VDI and they all seem stale....Deskpool seemed to have the client based upon on a good path, but I think the development has stopped.

VMWare has unknown future issues with organizations that will likely sour over time with the recent buy out.
**Most organizations of size leverage VDI Pools with Desktop (golden) images.

So my question is what is the best VDI client tool to use today, options?
Does the Proxmox development community have the appetite to open these options and/or work with volunteers to try out enhancements. I will put my hat and environment in for the works.

 

[Firebat]

UDS Enterprise works well with Proxmox. Havn't tried Version 3.6 yet, but 3.4 afair was relatively easy to setup.

 

[doge]

Flex 170 GPU from Intel - Subscription Free GPU Accelerated VDI on Proxmox 8.1​

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLK_i-TQ3kQ

 

[VoIP-Ninja]

Flex 170 GPU from Intel - Subscription Free GPU Accelerated VDI on Proxmox 8.1​

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLK_i-TQ3kQ

Will the Flex 170 also run with AMD CPUs like EPYC and Ryzen ? Asking for a friend...

 

[dcsapak]

Will the Flex 170 also run with AMD CPUs like EPYC and Ryzen ? Asking for a friend...

it ran here (after a bit of troubleshooting) on an AMD Epyc 7302P in my first tests

 

[VoIP-Ninja]

Production-ready ?

 

[shabsta]

it ran here (after a bit of troubleshooting) on an AMD Epyc 7302P in my first tests

Mind sharing the issues you ran into? Were they specific to the AMD chipset or proxmox?

 

[dcsapak]

Mind sharing the issues you ran into? Were they specific to the AMD chipset or proxmox?

well i don't think they were specific to amd, but who knows..

there were a mainly three bigger issues and i'm not fully clear on what causes them

* on some older platform (haswell era) the board was not able to boot with the card in it at all, no clue as to why
* in some configurations virtual functions could not be created, it seems this was fixed by moving (other unrelated) pci devices to different slots or removing them altogether (this was on an epyc board)
* sometimes, the vf seem to crash/get extremely slow and won't work properly afterwards (e.g. one can see gpu hangs in dmesg on the host etc) it goes from e.g. 140 FPS in guest to 1 FPS and finally hangs/crashes on guest reboot

the last issue may be due to thermal constraints or hardware/firmware issue, currently not clear

also currently the backport-driver does not compile on 6.8 (and our newest 6.5 either ) but i hope that will be fixed in the future
AFAIU the longer term plan is to integrate those drivers into the upstream kernel (though i don't have any idea when this will be?)

 

[shabsta]

well i don't think they were specific to amd, but who knows..

there were a mainly three bigger issues and i'm not fully clear on what causes them

* on some older platform (haswell era) the board was not able to boot with the card in it at all, no clue as to why
* in some configurations virtual functions could not be created, it seems this was fixed by moving (other unrelated) pci devices to different slots or removing them altogether (this was on an epyc board)
* sometimes, the vf seem to crash/get extremely slow and won't work properly afterwards (e.g. one can see gpu hangs in dmesg on the host etc) it goes from e.g. 140 FPS in guest to 1 FPS and finally hangs/crashes on guest reboot

the last issue may be due to thermal constraints or hardware/firmware issue, currently not clear

also currently the backport-driver does not compile on 6.8 (and our newest 6.5 either ) but i hope that will be fixed in the future
AFAIU the longer term plan is to integrate those drivers into the upstream kernel (though i don't have any idea when this will be?)

thanks for the feedback Dominik

I've encountered weird non related issues with proxmox and the latest generation EPYC's on Supermicro boards - specifically around IOMMU hence I asked about AMD. I found that disabling IOMMU in bios resolved these issues

I have a new intel system being shipped towards the end of this month with flex 170 cards in them so will run through some tests and revert back on my findings.