Either did I! Leveraging the GPU on the vSphere host it is possible to take advantage of performance acceleration. Using a guest five the entire Linux graphics stack can benefit from this improvement. Best part of all…VMware is releasing the driver code to the open-source community allowing for out of the box support reducing the need for addition tools and package installation.
The following Linux distributions are supported (based on their “What’s New Document”)
• Ubuntu: 12.04 and later • Fedora: 17 and later
• RHEL 7
With the new guest driver, modern Linux distributions are enabled to support technologies such as the following:
• OpenGL 2.1
• DRM kernel mode setting • Xrandr
• XRender
• Xv
Now the interesting part. While 5.1 released some basic support for 3D acceleration it was only supported on NVIDIA and left out AMD and Intel. With 5.5 they have expanded support to AMD but as of yet no support for Intel. Below is the statement from the KB
Hardware requirements
- AMD
- FirePro S7000 /S9000/S10000
- FirePro v7800P/V9800P
- NVIDIA
- Grid K1 and K2
Software requirements
- Windows 7 or Windows 8 virtual machines:
- VMware Horizon View 5.x or later
- vSphere Client or VMware Workstation client
- Linux virtual machines with the vmwgfx driver:
-
- Fedora 10 or later or Ubuntu 12 or later
- vSphere Clients or VMware Workstation clients
Note: Linux virtual machines do not include Horizon View support.
Leave a Reply