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Wanting to build a VDI to try and compensate for the loss of a dedicated lab. Students mostly do simple AutoCAD and Fusion stuff (nothing overly complex).

To reduce cost, I was thinking of buying a rack mountable server like the SuperMicro H13/14 GPU servers that would allow me to purchase consumer GPUs. But as I looked into it further, it seems that NVIDIA will not allow us to do this and there is additional licensing cost to allow us to do it (if one already bought the card, one would assume that they won’t intentionally cripple it’s capabilities to extract more money!!!)?

Has anyone done something similar and could provide tips/recommendations?

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Why does it need to be VDI?

VDI is massively expensive and desktop OSes, like Windows 10 and 11 require special licensing to run them as VM, namely an EA agreement with SA or VDA licenses - after the costs of the hardware, the licenses the GPUs and their respective licenses this isn’t cost effective for a small scale lab.

Consumer GPUs are also not supported, outside of pass-through.

You need VDI specific cards, by NVidia only and they require subscription licenses.

To do VDI right, is expensive.

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I was a school IT director for 2 decades. I gotta agree with Rod here. Unless an absolute need, VDI’s were champagne dreams on a beer budget. Too expensive.

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I’m a little confused on what you’re trying to accomplish.

AutoCAD & Fusion, being what they cost, were never a consideration for our budget.
We use a program called SketchUp for all graphic design classes. We’ve long since abandoned the dedicated lab in favor of one-to-one devices for students. SketchUp runs on all of our student devices without the need of a central server to connect them to.

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Autodesk only supported like two solutions like this. Things may have changed, but they were a Citrix solution and the other I think for Vmware View.

Yes, passing through GPU may be considered “Enterprise” these days.

The cost and power you had a local PCs don’t vaporize with a centralized solutions. In fact, they may be more expensive.

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There is no more space for a dedicated computer lab. They’ve all had to converted to a general classroom. As a public school (non US), we cannot dictate that pupils buy X device and some buy Chromebooks.

Yes, I know I could tell them to use Y software (GIMP instead of Photoshop, Blender instead of Maya, LibreOffice instead of MS Office, etc, etc) but good luck getting a teacher who has been teaching the same course for over two decades to switch to another software he/she needs to learn from scratch.

I am trying to see if I could find a technical solution since I have several old PCs / servers lying around, I was thinking of creating VMs that pupils could access from even the crappiest Chrombeook via browser through Guacamole. I know that works but the problem is when the app they’re using is GPU intensive, ACAD and Fusion just crawls. I need to be able to not just pass through the GPU but actually slice it.

I don’t need to worry about licensing costs for the apps as most (if not all) are being offered at deep academic discounts (Autodesk apps are actually free).

I can afford to purchase old consumer graphics cards (4 x 32GB Pascal-based NVIDIA cards) that in theory could serve up to 15 VMs with each one having 8GB of GPU power (enough for Fusion and ACAD) served up on 2 PCs running on KVM or VMware.

But without GPU sharing, I would need the equivalent of 15 x 8GB video cards. Assuming a max of 2 cards per PC, I would need 8 PCs.

At least that’s how I understood it with GPU passthrough (compared to GPU sharing).

Happy to be corrected if wrong.

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To be fair, VDI does not really sit well with extreme-end software like AutoCAD. As we have a design house (design & build server rooms & Data Centers within offices), we actually had VDI setup for AutoCAD with Max3ds, sketchup etc.

  1. The cost is going to be extreme as you are now trying to “compress” 10 Dell Precision Workstations (or mobile workstations) into 1 or 2 Dell servers (I would propose Dell servers for their warranty and hardware support).
  • Imagine each PC needs 32GB or 64GB RAM, so VDI going to have 320GB or 640GB RAM ? The Server RAM is going to cost 8-10 times that of Workstations (or mobile workstations) as you would be using the mnore expensive server components
  • The same can be saidfor CPU, GPU & storage

  1. Consumer grade GPU is not going to make it at all…you will not be playing games or running 1 session…but 8 sessions to 10 sessions. GPU requirements for AutoCAD is already rather extreme on Workstations (or mobile workstations)

  2. If you already had gotten academic pricing, why not also seek academic pricing from Dell or HPe for Workstations (or mobile workstations) ?

  3. You will still need to make space for Thin-Clients ? Thats why I mentioned the usage of Dell Precision Mobile workstations

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The cost of this is prohibitive for most places, even more so after the Broadcom acquisition.

You would need VMWare enterprise plus, Horizon View and NVidia GPUs with their subscription licensing.

Where would the VDI solution go then? If this would sit in the server room, why can’t the PCs also sit there and simply enable RDP for the users to connect?

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Bro…I think no need VMware Enterprise Plus but just Horizon View Bundle (View + vCenter) and per session/user View CALs. But I do not know about subscription as I renewed my VMware VDI in Nov 2023 for 36 mths…since 2018 we have since moved towards using Dell Precision lappy instead of refreshing our aging VDI servers…VDI will be killed off once the VMware maintainence and Dell warranty runs out next year.

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Bro.

Given what the OP is asking, they’ll need to investigate, standard may not cover what they want.

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But wad I meant is VMware View “Bundle” does not need VMware ESXi license

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Intel has a new datacenter GPU designed for VDI workloads.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/discrete-gpus/data-center-gpu/flex-series.html

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The base model comes at approx $8K and the next range is $12K (GPU only)… although still cheaper than the AMD M100 at $22K, we still need to weigh the overall performance vs using Dell Precision Mobile Workstations (eg 1 server vs 8 lappy) in terms of cost, performance & needs.

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Low Cost & VDI do not belong in the same sentence.

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