VMware Horizon Community
RickC3
Contributor
Contributor

AMD v340 MxGPU with Horizon View / ESXi 6.7

Hello,

Does anyone have any experience with the AMD v340 in an ESXi 6.7 / Horizon View 7.x environment?   We have had a support case open with AMD for a week and, thus far, not very impressed with their support.   We have not yet gotten to the appropriate engineer even though we have, essentially, a show-stopper issue.   VMware says they cannot help us because the v340 is not on the ESXi 6.7 HCL, even though AMD says the card is fully supported by 6.5U2 and 6.7 U2.

Looking for any hints or help...

We can get only ONE of the virtual desktops to actually talk to the card.   Once one desktop is talking to the GPU, no other desktop can.

Rick

Reply
0 Kudos
4 Replies
MaxStr
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

I'm not familiar with AMD, but if it's similar to nvidia GRID cards, there should be a setting in vcenter for graphics devices that may need to be set to "shared direct". Also the GRID card itself has some settings inside the GRID driver (accessed only via the ESX CLI) to change it from a single mode to a shared mode. The other important factor with GRID is the Windows driver version must match the ESXi driver version.

Reply
0 Kudos
sjesse
Leadership
Leadership

according to some docs I see amd is using Single-Root  I/O Virtualization, which is different then how nvidia does it. Here is one link that says the same

AMD's new Multiuser GPU will slug it out with Nvidia's Grid - ExtremeTech

I'd go through the steps again on setting it up and making sure sr iov is setup correctly.

Reply
0 Kudos
Toolbox123
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi Rick,

Sorry this won't help but I have found AMD to be terrible with Horizon.  I am using a Firepro 7150x2, AMD claims it is supported but barely anything works and their support has been next to useless.  I managed to get things working at a sub par level by using the documentation for doing things through the cli.  Nothing GUI related would work.  The more I dug around in the forums, it appears no one is happy with AMD.  Good luck.

Reply
0 Kudos
RickC3
Contributor
Contributor

Thank you for the responses thus far.

For the sake of those reading this and considering the AMD v340 cards for use in a Horizon environment - don't do it!

We have been working with VMware, Cisco (due to the servers being UCS) and AMD on this issue.   VMware says that the v340 is supported only on 6.5U2, but not on 6.7U2 (which we are running).   AMD, however, says that the v340 is supported on 6.7U2, so there is obviously a disconnect there.   AMD goes on to say that the card is only supported in standalone mode on the Cisco UCS platform, which makes it completely useless in a Horizon environment.   I struggle with understanding the MxGPU moniker, which supposedly means Multi-User GPU, when it only works in standalone mode.


I should also mention that AMD's technical support has been horrendous.   The have been downright unresponsive at times, and when they do respond, it takes days.   They have also been contradictory at times, with different engineers giving us conflicting information.   Further, there is apparently a professional graphics group within AMD that is tasked with supporting this card, but we are not able to talk directly to them and must communicate through the aforementioned slow/unresponsive support channel.   It has been extremely frustrating.

It looks like an RMA is in order.  Sadly, I was cheering for AMD to be a viable competitor to NVIDIA in this arena, but it just does not appear to be the case.  If anyone has any information for the contrary, I would love to hear it!

Warm regards,

Rick