My company has a rather large environment with over 40 VDI hosts (ProLiant DL580 G7s); currently on vSphere 5.1 U3 with plans to upgrade to 6.0 in the next few months. We are looking to increase the number of users on VMs and phase out our blade infrastructure, but one roadblock has been that many of these users have monitor setups that utilize portrait mode, a feature that is not natively supported by the VMware SVGA 3D graphics driver but is easily accomplished with the blades’ NVIDIA Quadro FX 560M drivers. I've searched high and low on the web and spent time on the phone with VMware support to confirm this. We also tried making registry changes and entering the inverse resolution in the vmx file to no avail.
I am now researching other possible solutions to present to my manager and am looking into GPU pass-though (graphics acceleration). From what I’ve read there are two different types: Dedicated Graphics Acceleration (vDGA) and Shared Graphics Acceleration (vSGA). According to this article vDGA can be ruled out as the physical card can only be assigned to one VM at a time. vSGA does not seem like it will work either, as the material I’ve found states this solution still uses the SVGA 3D graphics driver, just tapping into the physical GPU for performance boost. As portrait mode seems to be a function of the graphics driver, I have doubts vSGA will give me what I’m looking for. Also, all the articles I’ve read talk about graphics acceleration as a feature of VMware Horizon View, which our environment does not use. We use HP RGS as the remote graphics solution for our thin clients, which has the ability to flip the monitors to portrait mode, but the orientation inside the guest remains landscape.
I’m not really sure where else to look from here. It is possible that getting portrait mode to work inside a Windows 7 guest is not supported at this time? Is graphics acceleration only viable if we’re using Horizon View? Our virtual desktops perform just fine now and we have little requirement for the added graphics performance, so it seems like overkill to need a physical GPU for such a small feature as flipping a screen orientation. If anyone has had any experience in accomplishing this and can offer some insight it would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
