One of the big “announcements” at VMworld for sure came from NVIDIA. They solved the equation and are able to move a GPU enabled virtual machine. I hear you think that can’t have been the big news and you’re right. Of course the vMotion of a GPU enabled machine is a big deal already but that’s not the hard part. With a vMotion of a GPU 
enabled machine you would loose you data and that is were the biggest gain has been achieved. Mind you it is not a production announcement but a tech preview to show they got it running in a lab environment.
Resume and restart
This is rather big news as that’s quite a task to resume, keep all the work of the user like it was. for users this is very important as now you don’t loose the work you did when the machine is resumed. Think about the hibernation of your local device when you restart it you want to see all your work back on the screen.
vMotion
A vMotion is the next big thing they showed, moving a virtual machine from one host/datastore to another. vMotion when it was introduced for normal virtual machines was a big thing it allowed high availability for servers and later on for desktops as well. no more downtime just because the host has an issue. vMotion was not possible for GPU enabled machines so far (and still isn’t) and as we see more GPU usage this will be a requirement. You can’t design a highly available environment and say to the CAD users that they will loose their work in case of a disaster.
The demo is split in two video’s one shows the vMotion of a virtual machine and the other one shows the resume and restart of the virtual machine.
Resume and Restart video
In the next video you will see the Resume and Restart of a GPU enabled machine
In the video you see that they edit something in ACAd (sorry for the quality) and that they resume the virtual machine after that. Next they restart the virtual machine and you see (barely) that the changes in ACAD are still there. This is pretty awesome I think and for sure one of the biggest “announcements” at VMworld. When is it available you wonder? Not, not yet, not soon and no timeline…That is also why I put announcement in “”. It is a lab setup and it only shows they can do this. Now they will need to work on a production ready setup and that will take time. So will we see this anytime soon? We might but it might also take longer and if they run into consistency problems we might not see it at all.
vMotion video
In the next video you will see the vMotion of a GPU enabled virtual machine.
With the vMotion demo they show that they can move a GPU enabled virtual machine, this again is an awesome demo they showed at VMworld 2017 in Vegas. Again this is not going to be production anytime soon but it still is pretty awesome as you see a little glitch while moving the virtual machine. This technique is awesome as finally you could move a GPU virtual machines when you need to do maintenance on a host or in a distater without CAD workers losing data.
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