ESXi 5 and 3D graphics for 3D Studio Max

[markokobal]

Hi,

Has anybody been testing the new 3D support in ESXi 5? I'm particularly interested in running 3D Studio Max 2012 in the virtual machines. The installations of 3D Studio Max would be just for the rendering farm (no user interactions), but it should be fully installed and operational. The offical System Requirenments for 3D Studio Max 2012 says:

Direct3D 10, Direct3D 9, or OpenGL-capable graphics card† (256 MB or higher video card memory, 1 GB recommended)

Will my Windows 7 64bit virtual machines in ESXi 5 fulfill those requirements?

Thanks for any hint!

Kind regards.

[yashatre]

Though, I haven't tried it by myself, it should not be an issue if you have the requirement satisfying graphics card in the underlying hardware.

Enable 3D Support checkbox will be shown on Video card settings  page in Virtual Machine Properties dialog. If the host does not support  3D the checkbox will be disabled.
3D checkbox will be enabled only if the following requirements must be met:

1. The host supports 3D acceleration

2. The host OS supports 3D acceleration i.e. meaning ESX 5.0 and higher.

3. The VM HW version is 8 and higher.

Once you enable the 3D support in the VM, power it on, once booted, make sure all  your DirectX features are enabled .i.e

following should be enabled :

1. DirectDrow Acceleration

2. Direct3D Acceleration

3. AGP Texture Acceleration.

you can use DirectX Diagnostic Tool to do this.  In Windows 7, it should be Enabled by default if the proper H/W is presented to it.

Once this is done, the installation and operatations of 3D Studio Max 2012 should go smooth.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Yash.

[markokobal]

Hi,

yashatre, thanks for the helpful answer. I do have some additional questions:

About "1. The host supports 3D acceleration":

1. What does this actually mean? Should host server have phisical 3D graphic card?

2. Does VMware actually use the underlying physical 3D graphic card or does it emulate 3D graphic in the virtual machines via hosts main CPU?

2. Is there any official VMware whitepaper describing the requirements and usage of 3D acceleration in vSphere 5?

Thanks for the answers!

[yashatre]

1. What does this actually mean? Should host server have physical 3D graphic card?

- Yes, though you can enable the 3D feature in ESXi server just upon a CPU, however to get all the real features provided by a 3D graphic card, you has to have that hardware.

2. Does VMware actually use the underlying physical 3D graphic card or does it emulate 3D graphic in the virtual machines via hosts main CPU?

- Vmware does not emulate any specific graphic card, as GPU architectures changes rapidly across generations and their generational cycle is very short. Thus, it is nearly intractable to provide a virtual device corresponding to a real modern GPU. So we provide a idealized software only GPU and our own custom graphics drivers for it.

So even when you have a graphics card, it will not be emulated, however once you install VMware tools in your VM, the possible features of the card will be made available to you inside the Guest OS.

2. Is there any official VMware whitepaper describing the requirements and usage of 3D acceleration in vSphere 5?

- I'm not aware of such documentation as such till now. I'll post if I'll get something. However a card with support for accelerated OpenGL, such as NVIDIA TNT, GeForce  and Quadro cards, or ATI FireGL and Radeon 8500 (or higher) video cards should work fine.

Regards,

Yash.

[markokobal]

I've set up an test environment and can confirm that things actually works great. Another big + for VMware!

My host is an older HP DL360G5, 2x 3.0 GHz dual-cpu, 24 GB RAM and additional Nvidia Quadro FX 1500 GPU on PCIe. VMs configured with 3D support and 128 MB of video ram. Win7 and 3ds Max 2012 installs & runs without problems. Now I will also test some rendering performance and will post some results here...

Thanks for all the tips!

[RParker]

Marko Kobal wrote:

Hi,

Has anybody been testing the new 3D support in ESXi 5? I'm particularly interested in running 3D Studio Max 2012 in the virtual machines. The installations of 3D Studio Max would be just for the rendering farm (no user interactions), but it should be fully installed and operational. The offical System Requirenments for 3D Studio Max 2012 says:

Direct3D 10, Direct3D 9, or OpenGL-capable graphics card† (256 MB or higher video card memory, 1 GB recommended)

Will my Windows 7 64bit virtual machines in ESXi 5 fulfill those requirements?

Thanks for any hint!

Kind regards.

3D Studio max doesn't require a 3D card, that's a rendering software.. therefore it's CPU NOT Video... even conversion programs will not need high end video cards.. GAMES need 3d and high end cards, but you wouldn't run a game in a VM (at least it doesn't make sense)..

[RParker]

The offical System Requirenments for 3D Studio Max 2012 says:

Direct3D 10, Direct3D 9, or OpenGL-capable graphics card† (256 MB or higher video card memory, 1 GB recommended)

Yeah, I know what you are going to say.. but the documentation shows what is required.. it's ONLY required for Windows 7 / Vista / XP..

For general animation and rendering (typically fewer than 1,000 objects or 100,000 polygons):

...meaning where you DISPLAY those animations you create, THEN you need a high end card.. the documenation is slightly misleading...

[heydonms]

3D Studio max doesn't require a 3D card, that's a rendering software.. therefore it's CPU NOT Video

This is entirely incorrect. Any decent rendering software these days is capable of using the GPU to massively improve performance. This is the case regardless of whether you are outputting to a physical screen or just a video file on disk.

[markokobal]

Hi,

I would just like to leave a quick update on my work, done with ESXi 5 and 3D graphics for 3D Studio Max. I've found out that an 3D graphic card on the host is NOT a prerequisite, therefore you can run 3D Studio Max in a guest that is on just any kind of host. Further more I can say that I'm very satisfied the with the compatibility and performance:

1. The fact that ESXi 5 fully supports 3D graphics is very important in the stage of installation and configuration of 3D Studio Max on compute nodes. With ESXi 5 I can configure my Windows 7 guests with 3D graphic support and 128 MB of video ram. These are prerequisites for a successfull installation and configuration of the DirectX, base 3D Studio Max and some plug-ins (for example, V-Ray) in the guests.

2. I've configured 10 Windows 7 guests, each with 8 cores. I've made some benchmarking with BackBurner for the job manager and I can say that scalability and performance is great. For the comparison I've also installed and configured one node on bare metal with the same hardware configuration (I'm using HP DL360G5 with dual quad-core 3.0 GHz procs). I did various benchmarking with real-life rendering jobs, some simple ones and some that are using V-Ray and my conclusion is that there is only about 2 - 5% of virtualization overhead in comparison between a bare-metal rendering node and a single-guest-on-one-host virtualized rendering node.

And why is virtualizing rendering nodes for 3D Studio Max useful?

1. Cloud scenarios: I can provision and configure rendering nodes easy and transparently.

2. 3D Studio Max officially only supports Windows 7, however many older (even some newer ones) servers do not support Windows 7, so a virtualized guest is an only choice.

3. This one is the most important - there are many scenarios when rendering jobs does not scale very well when adding more cores, but does when adding many nodes. So there are many cases when rendering on 2 guests, configured with 4 cores each on a single host finishes job faster that a single physical host, configured with all the 8 cores.

Now, regarding the utilization of GP-GPUs and many-cores platforms (CUDA, OpenCL, etc.). There are some cases and some plug-ins that are already utilizing GP-GPUs for rendering and this is really nice. If we want to use GP-GPUs of course we have to forget about virtualization and use bare-metal platforms only. I hope that VMware will soon develop and release a pass-through interface for GP-GPUs so that we will be able to utilize them in virtual environments (Amazon has done a great job and has already did this for their highly customized Xen that powers the Amazon Web Services High Performance Computing nodes).

For the conclusion I can say that you can really make use of virtualized guest for 3D rendering right now, however the full potential will be unleashed when VMware releases pass-through interface for GP-GPUs.

[joeweez]

Is there any way of tweaking this to utilize more video ram?  256mb / 512mb  ?

[mcowger]

Erm, no.

Any decent software (including 3DSMAX) will ALSO use the card for the internal rendering, not just the display.

[ericptek]

What am I missing then?

esxi setup with a Win 7 Profressional VM, 128mb ram, 3d acceleration enabled using the 3DS Max Demo, the latest version.

Launch 3DS Max and it says "Requires ATI/Nvidia video card" and stops. 

Won't run.

Tested some other 3D apps and was pretty impressed with the performance.

There is no GPU in the server, its a Lenovo T230 Xeon 5640 2.4ghz, 16GB Ram.

Thanks

[markokobal]

Hi,

Make sure you have checked "Enable 3D support" and install DirectX 9 (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=35), then try again.

[ericptek]

Brainfart on my end.

3ds Max works fine, it was Mudroom that did not work.

Thanks

[markokobal]

Hi,

FYI: There is lot going on with virtualizing GPU's with VMware which will bring a whole new dimension on using 3D appliacations with virtual machines ... see http://www.virtuallygeeky.com/2012/10/virtualized-3d-gaming-on-vmware-view.html for more information.