NVIDIA Archives

NVIDIA A2 vGPU Profiles Missing from VMware Horizon causing provision failure

NVIDIA, NVIDIA vGPU, Omnissa Horizon, VMware 4 Responses »

Oct 032022

When deploying automated desktop pools with NVIDIA vGPU on VMware Horizon with an NVIDIA A2 GPU, you may notice provisioning fails with an error.

Error during Provisioning Cloning of VM VM-NAME-01 has failed: Fault type is UNKNOWN_FAULT_FATAL - No GPU capable host available for provisioning VM-NAME-01 with profile nvidia_a2-4q. Please refer to VMware KB 59271 for more details.

Further, when visiting VMware KB 59271 and performing the instructions, provisioning still continues to fail.

Screenshot of error message Automated vGPU Desktop Pool fails to provision due to missing vGPU profiles — Automated vGPU Desktop Pool fails to provision due to missing vGPU profiles

Essentially, at present there is no “supported” to resolve this issue without applying the fix listed in this post. Additionally, if you’re a VMware customer with an active support agreement, I would recommend opening a ticket with VMware Support so that it can be addressed in a future release.

The Problem

The NVIDIA A2 GPU is fairly new, along with VMware vSphere support. Even newer, is the support for vGPU and VMware Horizon, requiring the latest drivers (vGPU Drivers versions 14.2 released August 2022) to enable vGPU profiles for the card.

After troubleshooting this, I noted that the “graphic-profiles.properties” file in “C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Server\broker\conf” did not contain any NVIDIA A2 vGPU Profiles. Additionally, the file available on the VMware KB was also missing these profiles.

The Fix

To fix this, I referenced the NVIDIA vGPU User Guide to note the vGPU profiles allowed on the card, and created my own entries for the configuration file.

After adding these entries, restarting the server (or service), I was able to provision NVIDIA A2 enabled vGPU desktop pools.

To resolve this issue, add the following entries to your “graphic-profiles.properties” file in “C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware View\Server\broker\conf” (note, the contents of the file is case-sensitive):

# NVIDIA A2 Profiles
# Q-Series Virtual GPU Types for NVIDIA A2
nvidia_a2-16q=1
nvidia_a2-8q=2
nvidia_a2-4q=4
nvidia_a2-2q=8
nvidia_a2-1q=16

# B-Series Virtual GPU Types for NVIDIA A2
nvidia_a2-2b=8
nvidia_a2-1b=16

# C-Series Virtual GPU Types for NVIDIA A2
nvidia_a2-16c=1
nvidia_a2-8c=2
nvidia_a2-4c=4

# A-Series Virtual GPU Types for NVIDIA A2
nvidia_a2-16a=1
nvidia_a2-8a=2
nvidia_a2-4a=4
nvidia_a2-2a=8
nvidia_a2-1a=16

After restarting the server or services, you should now be able to use the NVIDIA A2 vGPU profiles with VMware Horizon automated (vGPU) desktop pools.

You should be able to use this fix for other new vGPU cards that have been recently released where the profiles have not been configured for Horizon. VMware is likely to fix this in future released of VMware Horizon.

GPU or vGPU Passthrough with 16GB+ of video memory

End User Computing, ESXi, NVIDIA vGPU, VDI, VMware 3 Responses »

Sep 042022

When either directly passing through a GPU, or attaching an NVIDIA vGPU to a Virtual Machine on VMware ESXi that has more than 16GB of Video Memory, you may run in to a situation where the VM fails to boot with the error “Module ‘DevicePowerOn’ power on failed.”. Special considerations are required when performing GPU or vGPU Passthrough with 16GB+ of video memory.

This issue is specifically caused by memory mapping a GPU or vGPU device that has 16GB of memory or higher, and could involve both the host system (the ESXi host) and/or the Virtual Machine configuration.

In this post, I’ll address the considerations and requirements to passthrough these devices to virtual machines in your environment.

In the order of occurrence, it’s usually VM configuration related, however if the recommendations in the “VM Configuration Considerations” section do not resolve the issue, please proceed to reviewing the “ESXi Host Considerations” section.

Please note that if the issue is host related, other errors may be present, or the device may not even be visible to ESXi.

VM GPU and vGPU Configuration Considerations

First and foremost, all new VMs should be created using the “EFI” Firmware type. EFI provides numerous advantages in device access and memory mapping versus the older style “BIOS” firmware types.

To do this, create a new virtual machine, navigate to “VM Options”, expand “Boot Options”, and confirm/change the Firmware to “EFI”. I recommend this for all new VMs, and not only for VMs accessing GPUs or vGPUs with over 16GB of memory. Please note that you shouldn’t change an existing VM, and should do this on a fresh new VM.

With performing GPU or vGPU Passthrough with 16GB+ of video memory, you’ll need to create a couple of entries under “Advanced” settings to properly configure access to these PCIe devices and provide the proper environment for memory mapping. The lack of these settings is specifically what causes the “Module ‘DevicePowerOn’ power on failed.” error.

Under the VM settings, head over to “VM Options”, expand “Advanced” and click on “Edit Configuration”, click on “Add Configuration Params”, and add the following entries:

pciPassthru.use64bitMMIO=”TRUE”
pciPassthru.64bitMMIOSizeGB=32

Example below:

VM GPU and vGPU Memory Settings for 16GB or higher memory mapping

You’ll notice that while our GPU or vGPU profile may have 16GB of memory, we need to double that value, and set it for the “pciPassthru.64bitMMIOSizeGB” variable. If your card or vGPU profile had 32GB, you’d set it to “64”.

Additionally if you were passing through multiple GPUs or vGPU devices, you’d need to factor all the memory being mapped, and double the combined amount.

ESXi GPU and vGPU Host Considerations

On most new and modern servers, the host level doesn’t require any special configuration as they are already designed to pass through such devices to the hypervisor properly. However in some special cases, and/or when using older servers, you may need to modify configuration and settings in the UEFI or BIOS.

If setting the VM Configuration above still results in the same error (or possibly other errors), than you most likely need to make modifications to the ESXi hosts BIOS/UEFI/RBSU to allow the proper memory mapping of the PCIe device, in our case being the GPU.

This is where things get a bit tricky because every server manufacturer has different settings that will need to be configured.

Look for the following settings, or settings with similar terminology:

“Memory Mapping Above 4G”
“Above 4G Decoding”
“PCI Express 64-Bit BAR Support”
“64-Bit IOMMU Mapping”

Once you find the correct setting or settings, enable them.

Every vendor could be using different terminology and there may be other settings that need to be configured that I don’t have listed above. In my case, I had to go in to a secret “SERVICE OPTIONS” menu on my HPE Proliant DL360p Gen8, as documented here.

After performing the recommendations in this guide, you should now be able to passthrough devices with over 16GB of memory.

Additional Resources:

NVIDIA vGPU VM Freezes during VMware vMotion: vGPU STUN Time

End User Computing, ESXi, GRID, NVIDIA, NVIDIA vGPU, Omnissa Horizon, VDI, vMotion, VMware 1 Response »

Jun 182022

When performing a VMware vMotion on a Virtual Machine with an NVIDIA vGPU attached to it, the VM may freeze during migration. Additionally, when performing a vMotion on a VM without a vGPU, the VM does not freeze during migration.

So why is it that adding a vGPU to a VM causes it to become frozen during vMotion? This is referred to as the VM Stun Time.

I’m going to explain why this happens, and what you can do to reduce these STUN times.

VMware vMotion

First, let’s start with traditional vMotion without a vGPU attached.

vMotion allows us to live migrate a Virtual Machine instance from one ESXi host, to another, with (visibly) no downtime. You’ll notice that I put “visibly” in brackets…

When performing a vMotion, vSphere will migrate the VM’s memory from the source to destination host and create checkpoints. It will then continue to copy memory deltas including changes blocks after the initial copy.

Essentially vMotion copies the memory of the instance, then initiates more copies to copy over the changes after the original transfer was completed, until the point where it’s all copied and the instance is now running on the destination host.

VMware vMotion with vGPU

For some time, we have had the ability to perform a vMotion with a VM that as a GPU attached to it.

VMware vSphere with NVIDIA vGPU — VMware VMs with vGPU

However, in this situation things work slightly different. When performing a vMotion, it’s not only the system RAM memory that needs to be transferred, but the GPU’s memory (VRAM) as well.

Unfortunately the checkpoint/delta transfer technology that’s used with then system RAM isn’t available to transfer the GPU, which means that the VM has to be stunned (frozen) to stop it so that the video RAM can be transferred and then the instance can be initialized on the destination host.

STUN Time

The STUN time is essentially the time it takes to transfer the video RAM (framebuffer) from one host to another.

When researching this, you may find examples of the time it takes to transfer various sizes of VRAM. An example would be from VMware’s documentation “Using vMotion to Migrate vGPU Virtual Machines“:

NVIDIA vGPU Estimated STUN Times — Expected STUN Times for vMotion with vGPU on 10Gig vMotion NIC

However, it will always vary depending on a number of factors. These factors include:

vMotion Network Speed
vMotion Network Optimization
- Multi-NIC vMotion to utilize multiple NICs
- Multi-vmk vMotion to optimize and saturate single NICs
Server Load
Network Throughput
The number of VM’s that are currently being migrated with vMotion

As you can see, there’s a number of things that play in to this. If you have a single 10Gig link for vMotion and you’re migrating many VMs with a vGPU, it’s obviously going to take longer than if you were just migrating a single VM with a vGPU.

Optimizing and Minimizing vGPU STUN Time

There’s a number of things we can look at to minimize the vGPU STUN times. This includes:

Upgrading networking throughput with faster NICs
Optimizing vMotion (Configure multiple vMotion VMK adapters to saturate a NIC)
Configure Multi-NIC vMotion (Utilize multiple physical NICs to increase vMotion throughput)
Reduce DRS aggressiveness
Migrate fewer VMs at the same time

All of the above can be implemented together, which I would actually recommend.

In short, the faster we migrate the VM, the less the STUN Time will be. Check out my blog post on Optimizing VMware vMotion which includes how to perform the above recommendations.

Hope this helps!

Nvidia vGPU GRID K1/K2 – No h264 session encoding offload

End User Computing, GRID, NVIDIA, Omnissa Horizon, VDI, VMware 12 Responses »

Oct 102020

If you’re like me and use an older Nvidia GRID K1 or K2 vGPU video card for your VDI homelab, you may notice that when using VMware Horizon that VMware Blast h264 encoding is no longer being offloaded to the GPU and is instead being encoded via the CPU.

The Problem

Originally when an environment was configured with an Nvidia GRID K1 or K2 card, not only does the card provide 3D acceleration and rendering, but it also offloads the VMware BLAST h264 stream (the visual session) so that the CPU doesn’t have to. This results in less CPU usage and provides a streamlined experience for the user.

This functionality was handled via NVFBC (Nvidia Frame Buffer Capture) which was part of the Nvidia Capture SDK (formerly known as GRID SDK). This function allowed the video card to capture the video frame buffer and encode it using NVENC (Nvidia Encoder).

Ultimately after spending hours troubleshooting, I learned that NVFBC has been deprecated and is no longer support, hence why it’s no longer functioning. I also checked and noticed that tools (such as nvfbcenable) were no longer bundled with the VMware Horizon agent. One can assume that the agent doesn’t even attempt to check or use this function.

Symptoms

Before I was aware of this, I noticed that while 3D Acceleration and graphics were functioning, I was experiencing high CPU usage. Upon further investigation I noticed that my VMware BLAST sessions were not offloading h264 encoding to the video card.

VMware Horizon Performance Tracker with NVidia GRID K1

You’ll notice above that under the “Encoder” section, the “Encoder Name” was listed as “h264 4:2:0”. Normally this would say “NVIDIA NvEnc H264” (or “NVIDIA NvEnc HEVC” on newer cards) if it was being offloaded to the GPU.

Looking at a VMware Blast session (Blast-Worker-SessionId1.log), the following lines can be seen.

[INFO ] 0x1f34 bora::Log: NvEnc: VNCEncodeRegionNvEncLoadLibrary: Loaded NVIDIA SDK shared library "nvEncodeAPI64.dll"
[INFO ] 0x1f34 bora::Log: NvEnc: VNCEncodeRegionNvEncLoadLibrary: Loaded NVIDIA SDK shared library "nvml.dll"
[WARN ] 0x1f34 bora::Warning: GetProcAddress: Failed to resolve nvmlDeviceGetEncoderCapacity: 127
[WARN ] 0x1f34 bora::Warning: GetProcAddress: Failed to resolve nvmlDeviceGetProcessUtilization: 127
[WARN ] 0x1f34 bora::Warning: GetProcAddress: Failed to resolve nvmlDeviceGetGridLicensableFeatures: 127
[INFO ] 0x1f34 bora::Log: NvEnc: VNCEncodeRegionNvEncLoadLibrary: Some NVIDIA nvml functions unavailable, unloading
[INFO ] 0x1f34 bora::Log: NvEnc: VNCEncodeRegionNvEncUnloadLibrary: Unloading NVIDIA SDK shared library "nvEncodeAPI64.dll"
[INFO ] 0x1f34 bora::Log: NvEnc: VNCEncodeRegionNvEncUnloadLibrary: Unloading NVIDIA SDK shared library "nvml.dll"
[WARN ] 0x1f34 bora::Warning: GetProcAddress: Failed to resolve nvmlDeviceGetEncoderCapacity: 127
[WARN ] 0x1f34 bora::Warning: GetProcAddress: Failed to resolve nvmlDeviceGetProcessUtilization: 127
[WARN ] 0x1f34 bora::Warning: GetProcAddress: Failed to resolve nvmlDeviceGetGridLicensableFeatures: 127

You’ll notice it tries to load the proper functions, however it fails.

The Solution

Unfortunately the only solution is to upgrade to newer or different hardware.

The GRID K1 and GRID K2 cards have reached their EOL (End of Life) and are no longer support. The drivers are not being maintained or updated so I doubt they will take advantage of the newer frame buffer capture functions of Windows 10.

Newer hardware and solutions have incorporated this change and use a different means of frame buffer capture.

To resolve this in my own homelab, I plan to migrate to an AMD FirePro S7150x2.

VDI 3D Graphics and Game Demo – Horizon, GRID, vGPU

HPE, NVIDIA, Omnissa Horizon, VMware 4 Responses »

May 182019

VMware Horizon View Mobile Client Android Windows 10 VDI Desktop

Since I’ve installed and configured my Nvidia GRID K1, I’ve been wanting to do a graphics quality demo video. I finally had some time to put a demo together.

I wanted to highlight what type of graphics can be achieved in a VDI environment. Even using an old Nvidia GRID K1 card, we can still achieve amazing graphical performance in a virtual desktop environment.

This demo outlines 3D accelerated graphics provided by vGPU.

Demo Video

Please see below for the video:

Information

Demo Specifications

VMware Horizon View 7.8
NVidia GRID K1
GRID vGPU Profile: GRID K180q
HPE ML310e Gen8 V2
ESXi 6.5 U2
Virtual Desktop: Windows 10 Enterprise
Game: Steam – Counter-Strike Global Offensive (CS:GO)

Please Note

Resolution of the Virtual Desktop is set to 1024×768
Blast Extreme is the protocol used
Graphics on game are set to max
Motion is smooth in person, screen recorder caused some jitter
This video was then edited on that VM using CyberLink PowerDirector
vGPU is being used on the VM

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