ChannelLife New Zealand - Industry insider news for technology resellers
Story image
NVIDIA expands licences for vGPU trial to 500
Mon, 30th Mar 2020
FYI, this story is more than a year old

NVIDIA has expanded its free, 90-day virtual GPU software evaluation from 128 to 500 licenses to support the huge growth in numbers of remote workers.

With vGPU software licenses, companies can use their on-premises NVIDIA GPUs to provide accelerated virtual infrastructure so people can work and collaborate from anywhere.

Companies can also temporarily repurpose NVIDIA GPUs being used on other projects to support their remote workers.

Traditional physical computing devices like a PC, laptop or server use GPUs to perform complex workflows, such as running 3D applications or streaming videos.

However, this is not ideal for professionals who need to work remotely or while on the go because the GPUs are tied to the physical devices, limiting mobility and flexibility.

Installed on a physical GPU in a server, NVIDIA vGPU software creates virtual GPUs that can be shared and allocated between multiple virtual machines.

This allows IT to create software-defined GPU acceleration for any workflow, on any device and any location.

NVIDIA offers a variety of customized vGPU software to meet diverse needs. All three tiers of the company's specialized vGPU software are available through the expanded free licensing:

  • NVIDIA GRID software delivers responsive VDI by virtualising systems and applications for knowledge workers.
    GRID virtual PC (GRID vPC) and virtual apps (GRID vApps) use GPUs to deliver virtualised Windows 10 workspaces to every remote user, providing optimisation for office apps and multimedia.
     
  • NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstation software provides workstation-class performance for creators using high-end graphics applications.
    This also helps geographically dispersed teams collaborate and securely access apps and data in real-time, from anywhere and on any connected device and includes support for up to two 8K displays
     
  • NVIDIA Virtual Compute Server software accelerates server virtualisation with GPUs to power the most compute-intensive workflows, such as AI, deep learning and data science on a virtual machine.

NVIDIA vGPU software ensures protection for sensitive data and digital assets, which remain in the data center and aren't saved to local client devices.

It is certified on a broad ecosystem of hypervisors, platforms, user applications and management software to help IT teams quickly scale-out support for remote workers.

Companies can deploy virtual workstations, compute and VDI from their on-prem data centers by installing the vGPU software licenses on all NVIDIA GPUs based on the Pascal, Volta and Turing architectures, including NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 and RTX 8000 GPUs, and NVIDIA M10 and M60 GPUs.

NVIDIA is also providing genomics researchers studying COVID-19 free access to Parabricks software for 90 days.