Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

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Last day of my Take 3 with the @ProjectVXR team!

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Today is the last day of my Take 3 with the Project VXR team. Ridiculous how fast these 3 months went. It seems like only yesterday that I posted I was going to start this journey of learning more about the world of Spatial Computing and Remote Rendering of VR in particular. If I say so myself, I feel that over the past 3 months I managed to accomplish quite a lot. The last three months I spend figuring out how to virtualize a Virtual Reality application and how to stream the application to a head-mounted display. I tested different solutions in this space, some of which I discussed on my blog in the past months, and I was surprised how smooth it worked, to be honest. If you are interested in this space, my recommendation would be to look into NVIDIA CloudXR in combination with vSphere 6.7 U3 and NVIDIA vGPU technology.

I can’t share all the details just yet, I wrote a white paper, which now needs to go through reviews and copy editing, and hopefully, it will be published soon. I will, however, discuss some of my findings and my experience during some of the upcoming VMUGs I will be presenting at. Hopefully, people will enjoy it and appreciate it.

One thing I would like to do is thank a few people who helped me tremendously in the past few months. First of all, of course, the folks on the Project VXR team, they gave me all the pointers/hints/tips I needed and shared a wealth of knowledge on the topic of spatial computing. I also like to thank Grid Factory, Ben in particular, for the many discussions, emails etc that we had. Of course also NVIDIA for the discussions and help around the lab equipment. Last but not least, I want to thank the VMware OCTO team focussing on Dell Technologies for providing me with a Dell Precision Workstation, and shipping it out literally within a day or two. Much appreciated everyone!

Now it is time to get back to reality.

vGPUs and vMotion, why the long stun times?

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Last week one of our engineers shared something which I found very interesting. I have been playing with Virtual Reality technology and NVIDIA vGPUs for 2 months now. One thing I noticed is that we (VMware) introduced support for vMotion in vSphere 6.7 and support for vMotion of multi vGPU VMs in vSphere 6.7 U3. In order to enable this, you need to set an advanced setting first. William Lam described this in his blog how to set this via Powershell or the UI. Now when you read the documentation there’s one thing that stands out, and that is the relatively high stun times for vGPU enabled VMs. Just as an example, here are a few potential stun times with various sized vGPU frame buffers:

  • 2GB – 16.5 seconds
  • 8GB – 61.3 seconds
  • 16GB – 100+ seconds (time out!)

This is all documented here for the various frame buffer sizes. Now there are a couple of things to know about this. First of all, the time mentioned was tested with 10GbE and the NVIDIA P40. This could be different for an RTX6000 or RTX8000 for instance. Secondly, they used a 10GbE NIC. If you use multi-NIC vMotion or for instance a 25GbE NIC than results may be different (times should be lower). But more importantly, the times mentioned assume the full frame buffer memory is consumed. If you have a 16GB frame buffer and only 2GB is consumed then, of course, the stun time would be lower than the above mentioned 100+ seconds.

Now, this doesn’t answer the question yet, why? Why on earth are these stun times this long? The vMotion process is described in this blog post by Niels in-depth, so I am not going to repeat it. It is also described in our Clustering Deep Dive book which you can download here for free. The key reason why with vMotion the “down time” (stun times) can be kept low is that vMotion uses a pre-copy process and tracks which memory pages are changed. In other words, when vMotion is initiated we copy memory pages to the destination host, and if a page has changed during that copy process we mark it as changed and copy it again. vMotion does this until the amount of memory that needs to be copied is extremely low and this would result in a seamless migration. Now here is the problem, it does this for VM memory. This isn’t possible for vGPUs unfortunately today.

Okay, so what does that mean? Well if you have a 16GB frame buffer and it is 100% consumed, the vMotion process will need to copy 16GB of frame buffer memory from the source to the destination host when the VM is stunned. Why when the VM is stunned? Well simply because that is the point in time where the frame buffer memory will not change! Hence the reason this could take a significant number of seconds unfortunately today. Definitely something to consider when planning on using vMotion on (multi) vGPU enabled VMs!

Disabling the frame rate limiter for your vGPU

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I have been testing with Virtual Reality apps within a VM for the past few days and I am leveraging NVIDIA vGPU technology on vSphere 6.7 U3. I was running into some undesired behavior and was pointed to the fact that this could be due to the frame rate being limited by default (Thank Ben!). I first checked the head-mounted display to see at what kind of frame rate it was running, by leveraging “adbLink” (for Mac) and the logcat command I could see the current frame rate hovering between 55-60. For virtual reality apps that leads to problems when moving your head from left to right as you will see black screens. For the Quest, for those wanting to play around with it as well, I used the following command to list the current frame rate for the NVIDIA CloudXR application (note that this is specific to this app) and “-s” filters for the keyword “VrApi”:

logcat -s VrApi

The result will be a full string, but the important bit is the following:

FPS=72,Prd=32ms,Tear=0,Early=0

I was digging through the NVIDIA documentation and it mentioned that if you used the Best Effort scheduler a frame rate limit would be applied. I wanted to test with the different schedulers anyway so I switched over to the Equal Share scheduler, which solved the problems listed above as it indeed disabled the frame rate limit. I could see the frame rate going up between 70 and 72. Of course, I also wanted to validate the “best effort” scheduler with frame rate limit disabled, I did this by adding an advanced setting to the VM:

pciPassthru0.cfg.frame_rate_limiter=0

This also resulted in a better experience, and again the frame rate going up to 70-72.

Adding multiple vGPUs to a Virtual Machine

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Last week we have been testing with vGPUs in our lab for our Virtual Reality applications. We also had the need to do some rendering. The rendering that we needed to do required a lot of GPU power so we figured we would test the rendering within a virtual machine using a vGPU. This by itself worked fairly well with a single vGPU with a grid_rtx8000p-12q vGPU profile. The next thing we wanted to test was having multiple vGPUs associated with a single Virtual Machine. We have vSphere 6.7 U3 in our lab, so that should be fully supported. The first thing you will need to do is make sure your VMs are VM compatibility version 15. Without 15 you can’t even add a second vGPU to begin with.

We added the two vGPUs to our environment and tried to power it on. Below screenshots show the vGPUs configured followed, unfortunately, by a screenshot of the error message we received. For completeness sake and search engine goodness here is the error message I received in text:

Could not initialize plugin '/usr/lib64/vmware/plugin/libnvidia-vgx.so'

I did some digging and figured out that the NVIDIA Documentation explained why, you can only add multiple vGPUs using a particular profile. The VMware guidance on this is a bit fuzzy unfortunately, but I requested the blog post to be edited. The NVIDIA document is very clear, you can only use the 48q or 48c profile with the RTX8000. For the various cards this is documented here. After adding two vGPUs with the 48q profile, like shown below, the VM powers on perfectly, well after you powered off any other workload using a vGPU that is, as the 48q/c profile claims the full card!

And for completeness sake, if you don’t power off the other VMs using a vGPU then you will receive the following error:

the amount of graphics resource available in the parent resource pool is insufficient for the operation.

Which is also shown in the below screenshot.

So to recap, if you want to use multiple vGPUs here are the requirements/constraints:

  • vSphere 6.7 Update 3 is required
  • VM Compatibility Version 15 is required
  • Only “q” anc “c” profiles are supported
  • You need to select the full frame buffer for each vGPU (highest), for RTX8000 that would be 48q or 48c
    • This results in not being able to run any other vGPUs on those physical cards
  • Maximum of 4 vGPUs per VM

I hope this helps someone who is planning on configuring something similar.

Installing the NVIDIA software on an ESXi host and configuring for vGPU usage

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I have been busy in the lab with testing our VR workload within a VM and then streaming the output to a head-mounted display. Last week I received a nice new shiny NVIDIA RTX6000 to use in my Dell Precision workstation. I received a passively cooled RTX8000 at first, by mistake that is. And the workstation wouldn’t boot as it doesn’t support that card, great in hindsight as would have probably been overheated fast considering the lack of airflow in my home office. After adding the RTX6000 to my machine it booted and I had to install the NVIDIA vib on ESXi. I also had to configure the host accordingly. I did it through the command-line as that was the fastest for me. I started with copying the vib file to /tmp/ on the ESXi host using scp and then did the following:

esxcli system maintenanceMode set –e true
esxcli software vib install –v /tmp/NVIDIA**.vib
esxcli system maintenanceMode set –e false
reboot

The above places the host in maintenance mode, installs the vib, removes the host from maintenance mode and then reboots it. The other thing I had to do, as I am planning on using vGPU technology, is to set the host by default to “Shared Direct – Vendor shared passthrough graphics”. You can also do this through the command-line as follows:

esxcli graphics host set --default-type SharedPassthru

You can also set the assigned policy:

esxcli graphics host set --shared-passthru-assignment-policy <Performance | Consolidation>

I configured it set to “performance” as for my workload this is crucial, it may be different for your workload though. In other to ensure these changes are reflected in the UI you will either need to reboot the host, or you can restart Xorg the following way:

/etc/init.d/xorg stop
nv-hostengine -t
nv-hostengine -d
/etc/init.d/xorg start

That is what it took. I realized after the first reboot I could have configured the host graphics configuration and changed the default policy for the passthrough assignment first probably and then reboot the host. That would also avoid the need to restart Xorg as it would be restarted with the host.

If there’s a need for it, you can also change the NVIDIA vGPU scheduler being used. There are three options available: “Best Effort”, “Equal Share”, and “Fixed Share”. Using esxcli you can configure to use a particular scheduler. This is also documented here. I set my host to Equal Share with a 1 milisecond time slice, which you can do as shown below.

esxcli system module parameters set -m nvidia -p "NVreg_RegistryDwords=RmPVMRL=0x00010001"

And for those who care, you can see within vCenter which VM is associated with which GPU, but you can also check this via the command-line of course:

esxcli graphics vm list

And the following command will list all the devices present in the host:

esxcli graphics device list

On twitter I was just pointed to a script which lists the vGPU vib version across all hosts of your vCenter Server instances. Very useful if you have a larger environment. Thanks Dane for sharing.