VMWare Workstation Linux OS using NVIDIA card from Windows host

[Anub1z]

Hello
I plan to buy a gaming laptop to use for office work and machine learning.
[I work as developer for image processing and deep neural networks]
Since my complete office environment at employer side is Windows based there is no option for me for the host OS (== Windows 10).
For deep neural networks with PyTorch or tensorflow a Linux OS is the only reasonable choice.
Which is why I want to use VMWare Workstation...

So here my question: Is a Linux guest OS running in WMVare Workstation Player (or Pro?) able to use my high end grafic card (GTX 3080 with 16GB VRAM) from the Windows 10 host? (without the need of a second card!?)
This probably boils down to: Is WMVare Workstation able to do gpupassthrough?
And is 16GB VRAM on the card supported?

I asked the same question to the VMWare Support, but they just sent me a link to the list of features of VMWare Workstation.
This mentions "3D graphics with DX11 and OpenGL 4.1 support" and " Large Graphics Memory: 8GB".
Well the first does not say gpupassthrough and I will need 16GB for my training. So not sure :S

Does anyone have experience with this?
Does it run? (efficiently?)
Do I maybe need to use onboard grafic on the host? (thats probably enough for office stuff, even with a lot of images)

Regards,
Bernd

[wila]

Bernd,

Easy question & easy answer.

VMware Workstation (Pro or Player it doesn't matter) does not offer GPU passthrough.

If you want to directly access GPU's then you'll need at least VMware vSphere / ESXi, but that means you'll loose your host OS and that is not an option as you say. Besides that running ESXi on a laptop makes no sense as you'll need to use another machine to access your guest OS's.

--
Wil

[Anub1z]

Thank you for that clear answer, even if I don't like it so much :S

[bluefirestorm]

Depending whether your employer IT allows/support this, an alternative is to have a Linux OS run on the laptop and run the Windows OS for office work as a VM. So you can run the PyTorch and Tensorflow stuff natively on the host machine with Linux OS to access the Nvidia GPU.

[Anub1z]

Yes, that is exactly what I am investigating.
Will be a fight with my IT, though :S