Can Azure Local hold a VDI environment that can do graphical intensive stuff?
Bro….I need to run AutoCad in my environment how do I get that set up?
First thing is to purchase supported GPUs. If these gpus are not supported none of this will work. (Note: This is different for GPU support in AKS, I will discuss this in a later post). Here are the currently (as of this writing)
The following GPU models are supported using both DDA and GPU-P for Azure Local VM workloads:
- NVIDIA A2
- NVIDIA A16
These additional GPU models are supported using GPU-P (only) for VM workloads:
- NVIDIA A10
- NVIDIA A40
- NVIDIA L4
- NVIDIA L40
- NVIDIA L40S
Now, you will also need a license with nvidia, and a license server to enable these.
Sweet. These are installed, what’s next?
In our case we partitioned the GPUs however, if your requirements need it, you can use Direct Device Assignment (DDA). I needed to download the NVidia drivers from their enterprise site. I extracted the zip file to a share. Then I RDP’d to each machine and entered powershell
I changed to the directory where my drivers were and ran the following:
pnputil /add-driver .\nvgridswhci.inf /install /force
Next I checked to make sure the cards are properly:
Get-PnpDevice -Class Display | fl FriendlyName, ClusterId
You should see the GPU Names, in the above output, you will need this for the next command.
Now, you need to deploy AVD. Once AVD is deployed, we need to attach the GPU’s to the virtual machines. This is ran for each machine in the cluster.
az stack-hci-vm gpu attach –resource-group “$ResourceGroupl” –vm-name $VMName –gpus GpuP
Once that is completed, you will need to go into each Virtual Machine and install the drivers and apply the NVidia Licenses.
DUUUUUUDE….. This is easier than having a traditional RDP Farm…
By deploying AVD on Azure Local you leverage azure to host the Hostpools, gateways, etc that you would need in a traditional RDP environment. The Virtual Machines are hosted on premise on the AZLocal cluster. From here you can control access and have access to your on premise resources.
