Setting Up Desktop and Application Pools in View

Overview of Steps for Preparing for vDGA Capabilities
This overview is an outline of tasks you must perform in vSphere before you can create or configure
desktop pools in View Administrator. For complete information and detailed procedures, see the VMware
white paper about graphics acceleration.
1 Verify that VT-d or AMD IOMMU is enabled on the ESXi host.
2 Enable GPU device pass-through on the ESXi host.
3 Add a PCI device to the virtual machine and select the appropriate PCI device to enable GPU pass-
through on the virtual machine.
4 Reserve all memory when creating the virtual machine.
5 Obtain the GPU drivers from the GPU vendor and install the GPU device drivers in the guest operating
system of the virtual machine.
6 Install VMware Tools and View Agent in the guest operating system and reboot.
After you perform these tasks, you must add the virtual machine to a manual pool View desktop pool so
that you can access the guest operating system using PCoIP. In a PCoIP session, you can then activate the
NVIDIA display adapter in the guest operating system.
Examining GPU Resources on an ESXi Host
To better manage the GPU resources that are available on an ESXi host, you can examine the current GPU
resource reservation. The ESXi command-line query utility, gpuvm, lists the GPUs that are installed on an
ESXi host and displays the amount of GPU memory that is reserved for each virtual machine on the host.
Note that this GPU memory reservation is not the same as virtual machine VRAM size.
To run the utility, type gpuvm from a shell prompt on the ESXi host. You can use a console on the host or an
SSH connection.
For example, the utility might display the following output:
~ # gpuvm
Xserver unix:0, GPU maximum memory 2076672KB
pid 118561, VM "JB-w7-64-FC3", reserved 131072KB of GPU memory.
pid 64408, VM "JB-w7-64-FC5", reserved 261120KB of GPU memory.
GPU memory left 1684480KB.
Similarly, you can use the nvidia-smi command on the ESXi host to see a list of NVIDIA GRID vGPU-
enabled virtual machines, the amount of frame buffer memory consumed, and the slot ID of the physical
GPU that the virtual machine is using.
Prevent Access to View Desktops Through RDP
In certain View environments, it is a priority to prohibit access to View desktops through the RDP display
protocol. You can prevent users and administrators from using RDP to access View desktops by configuring
pool settings and a group policy setting.
By default, while a user is logged in to a View desktop session, you can use RDP to connect to the virtual
machine from outside of View. The RDP connection terminates the View desktop session, and the View
user's unsaved data and settings might be lost. The View user cannot log in to the desktop until the external
RDP connection is closed. To avoid this situation, disable the AllowDirectRDP setting.
NOTE Remote Desktop Services must be started on the virtual machine that you use to create pools and on
the virtual machines that are deployed in the pools. Remote Desktop Services are required for View Agent
installation, SSO, and other View session-management operations.
Chapter 11 Provisioning Desktop Pools
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