VMware Cloud Community
g0dMAn
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Unable to use PCoIP with GPU Passthrough

I have a whitebox ESXi 5.5u2 host that runs great.  PCoIP works great for a couple of VMs, and GPU passthrough works great as well, but if I want to do both for a particular VM, it won't work simultaneously.  Of the several VMs I run, here are what's worth noting:

  1. I have a Win10 VM that successfully passes through an AMD HD6450. I then hook this up via cat6 ethernet passthrough from my basement (ESXi whitebox host) to our master bedroom and I watch TV on Windows Media Center and 1080p movies via Kodi. It works great!!
  2. I also have a couple of VMs I use PCoIP and the Horizon client with (windows 7 and windows 10) -- works great!
  3. The Issue: I have another Win10 VM that successfully passes through an AMD HD5450 to a monitor. What I'd like to do is use the Horizon client to connect via PCoIP to watch movies/TV.  PCoIP only works if I disable the GPU passthrough.  When the GPU passthrough is set up, I get the notorious black-screen during a PCoIP session and shortly after it times out.  The reason I want to use the GPU passthrough is for hardware acceleration.  If I remove the GPU passthrough, the CPU gets slammed to do the video processing and that's inefficient for my setup... not only that, but the HD videos are a bit choppy (definitely not acceptable).

I've looked at the logs in \ProgramData\VDM\Logs, but not sure which specific one is best to look at.  Since I didn't know which to check, I looked at debug_date_time.txt, the log_date.txt, the pcoip_agent log, and the pcoip_server log.  I don't know the major diff between the logs files, but if someone could explain which to look at, I will even submit them here (if that helps).

Or... Does anyone have advice on how to get this to work with a whitebox ESXi host and a desktop GPU?  I believe it's been done before.  I also have more GPUs to use if need be:

-ATI/AMD Radeon HD6970

-nVidia 200-series GPU somewhere

-GeForce 8400GS I may be able to dig up

-ATI/AMD Radeon HD6450 (currently used on another VM that I don't need pcoip for)

-ATI/AMD Radeon HD5450 (currently trying in the example above with pcoip)

Thanks in advance.

Tags (1)
Reply
0 Kudos
1 Reply
g0dMAn
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Has no one tried this here?

Reply
0 Kudos