NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center

Workstation Sizing Guide

With Teradici for Autodesk Maya 2020 with Arnold Renderer 6

Application Sizing Guide

SP-09980-001_v02 | September 2020

 Document History

SP-09980-001_v02
Version Date Authors Description of Change
01 May 27, 2020 EA, NS, SM Initial Release
02 September 21, 2020 EA, NS, SM Branding update

NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Work station Sizing Guide SP-09980-001_v02 | ii
 Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Executive Summary ................................................................................... 1

Chapter 2. About Autodesk Maya 2020 and Arnold ................................................... 2
Chapter 3. OEM Servers Supported with NVIDIA GPUs ............................................ 3
3.1 About this Solution...................................................................................................4
3.2 NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs ........................................................................................4
3.3 NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstation Software .........................................4
3.4 VMware vSphere......................................................................................................5
3.5 Teradici Cloud Access Software................................................................................5
Chapter 4. Autodesk Maya and Arnold PoC Testing .................................................. 6
4.1 VM1 and VM2 - Modeling, Texturing and Shading ......................................................7
4.2 VM3 - Animation ......................................................................................................8
4.3 VM4 - Lighting and Rendering ..................................................................................9
4.4 Evaluating vGPU Frame Buffer............................................................................... 10
Chapter 5. Findings .................................................................................................... 11
Chapter 6. Deployment Best Practices..................................................................... 12
6.1 Run a Proof of Concept .......................................................................................... 12
6.2 Leverage Management and Monitoring Tools.......................................................... 12
6.3 Understand Your Users.......................................................................................... 13
6.4 Understanding the GPU Scheduler ......................................................................... 13
Chapter 7. Summary ................................................................................................... 15
Appendix A. Solution Configuration and Details ........................................................ 16
A.1 Server Recommendation: Dual Socket, 2U Rack Server........................................... 17
A.2 Flash Based Storage for Best Performance ............................................................ 17
A.3 Typical Networking Configuration for Quadro vDWS ................................................ 17
A.4 Optimizing for Dedicated Quality of Service ............................................................. 17

NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Work station Sizing Guide SP-09980-001_v02 | iii
 List of Figures

Figure 3-1. NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Workstation Solution ..................................................3

Figure 4-1. 3D Production Pipeline..................................................................................6
Figure 4-2. VM Modeling, Texturing and Shading Example ...............................................7
Figure 4-3. VM3 Animation Example................................................................................8
Figure 4-4. VM4 Lighting and Rendering Example............................................................9

List of Tables

Table 6-1. Metrics for a Successful PoC Example......................................................... 12

Table A-1. Solution Components.................................................................................. 16

NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Work station Sizing Guide SP-09980-001_v02 | iv
Chapter 1. Executive Summary

This specification provides insights on how to deploy NVIDIA® Quadro® Virtual Data Center
Workstation (Quadro vDWS) software for modern day production pipelines within the Media
and Entertainment industry. Recommendations are based on actual customer deployments
and sample-of-concept (POC) artistic 3D production pipeline workflows and cover three
common questions:
 Which NVIDIA GPU should I use for a 3D Production pipeline?
 How do I select the right profile(s) for the types of users I will have?
 Using sample 3D production pipeline workflows, how many users can be supported (user
density) for this server configuration and workflow?
This solution offers a highly flexible reference design which combines NVIDIA Quadro RTX™
6000 or Quadro RTX 8000 graphics processing units (GPUs) with NVIDIA virtual GPU software
running on OEM server hardware. IT administrators can provision multiple, easy-to-manage
virtual workstations to tackle various artistic workloads. Since user behavior varies and is a
critical factor in determining the best GPU and profile size, the recommendations in this
reference architecture are meant to be a guide. The most successful customer deployments
start with a Proof of Concept (POC) and are “tuned” throughout the lifecycle of the deployment.
Beginning with a POC enables customers to understand the expectations and behavior of their
users and optimize their deployment for the best user density while maintaining required
performance levels. A POC also allows administrators to understand infrastructure conditions,
such as network, which is a key component to ensure performance within their specific
environment. Continued maintenance is important because user behavior can change over the
course of a project and as the role of an individual changes in the organization along with
potential improvement of displays during refresh cycles. A 3D production artist that was once
a light graphics user might become a heavy graphics user when they change teams, assigned
to a different project or even receive a display upgrade to a higher resolution monitor. NVIDIA
virtual GPU management and monitoring tools enable administrators and IT staff to ensure
their deployment is optimized for each user.

NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Work station Sizing Guide SP-09980-001_v02 | 1
Chapter 2. About Autodesk Maya 2020
and Arnold

Autodesk Maya 2020 is one of the most recognizable applications for 3D computer animation,
modeling, simulation, and rendering utilized to create expansive worlds, complex characters,
and dazzling effects. Creative professionals bring believable characters to life with engaging
animation tools, shape 3D objects and scenes with intuitive modeling tools, and create
realistic effects - from explosions to cloth simulation all within the Maya software.
Autodesk Arnold is the built-in interactive renderer for Maya and is an advanced Monte Carlo
ray tracing renderer. It is designed for artists and for the demands of modern animation and
visual effects (VFX) production. Originally co-developed with Sony Pictures Imageworks and
now their main renderer, Arnold is used at over 300 studios worldwide including ILM,
Framestore, MPC, The Mill and Digic Pictures. Arnold was the primary renderer on dozens of
films from Monster House and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to Pacific Rim and Gravity. It
is available as a standalone renderer on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS, with supported plug-ins
for Maya, 3dsMax, Houdini, Cinema 4D, and Katana.
Autodesk works closely with NVIDIA to ensure that creative innovation is never over. Studio
drivers are released throughout the year to supercharge your favorite, most demanding
applications. Using the same NVIDIA Studio drivers that are deployed on non-virtualized
systems, NVIDIA Quadro vDWS software provides virtual machines (VMs) with the same
breakthrough performance and versatility that the NVIDIA RTX platform offers to a physical
environment. VDI eliminates the need to install Autodesk Arnold and Maya on a local client,
which can help reduce IT support and maintenance costs and enables greater mobility and
collaboration. This virtual workstation deployment option enhances flexibility and further
expands the wide variety of platform choices available to Autodesk customers.

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Chapter 3. OEM Servers Supported with
NVIDIA GPUs

This reference design is comprised of the following components:

 Qualified OEM server
 NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 and/or Quadro RTX 8000 graphics cards
 NVIDIA Quadro vDWS GPU virtualization software
 Autodesk Maya 2020 design software
 Autodesk Arnold 6 rendering software
 Teradici Cloud access software
This validated solution provides unprecedented rendering and compute performance at a
fraction of the cost, space, and power consumption of traditional CPU-based render nodes, as
well as high performance virtual workstations enabling designers and artists to arrive at their
best work, faster.

Figure 3-1. NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Workstation Solution

NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Work station Sizing Guide SP-09980-001_v02 | 3
 OEM Servers Supported with NVIDIA GPUs

Refer to Appendix A for further details regarding the system configuration used to complete
the rigorous NVIDIA NVQual verification for Autodesk Maya, Autodesk Arnold, and Teradici
software packages.

3.1 About this Solution

This validated reference design can run multiple workloads that are accelerated by Quadro
RTX 6000 or Quadro RTX 8000 GPUs. When deployed for high performance virtual
workstations, the solution delivers a native physical workstation experience from the data
center, enabling creative professionals to do their best work from anywhere, using any device.
This solution can also bring GPU-acceleration and performance to deliver the most efficient
end-to-end rendering solution, from interactive sessions in the desktop to final batch
rendering in the data center. Content production is undergoing massive growth as render
complexity and quality demands increase. Designers and artists across industries continually
strive to produce more visually rich content faster than ever before, yet find their creativity and
productivity bound by inefficient CPU-based render solutions. Our NVIDIA GPU accelerated
solution delivers the performance that all artists need, by allowing them to take advantage of
key GPU enhancements to increase interactivity and visual quality, while centralizing GPU
resources.

3.2 NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs

The NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 and Quadro RTX 8000, both powered by the NVIDIA Turing ™
architecture and the NVIDIA RTX platform, bring the most significant advancement in
computer graphics in over a decade to professional workflows. Designers and artists can now
wield the power of hardware-accelerated ray tracing, deep learning, and advanced shading to
dramatically boost productivity and create amazing content faster than ever before. The
Quadro RTX 6000 has 24 GB of GPU memory, whereas the Quadro RTX 8000 has 48 GB to
handle larger animations or visualizations. The artistic workflows covered within our testing
for this reference architecture used Quadro RTX 6000 GPUs.

3.3 NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center

Workstation Software
NVIDIA virtual GPU (vGPU) software enables the delivery of graphics-rich virtual desktops and
workstations accelerated by NVIDIA GPUs. There are three versions of NVIDIA vGPU software
available, one being NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstation (Quadro vDWS). NVIDIA
Quadro vDWS software includes the Quadro graphics driver required to run professional 3D
applications. The Quadro vDWS license enables sharing an NVIDIA GPU across multiple virtual
machines, or multiple GPUs can be allocated to a single virtual machine to power the most
demanding workflows.

NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Work station Sizing Guide SP-09980-001_v02 | 4
 OEM Servers Supported with NVIDIA GPUs

NVIDIA Quadro is the world’s preeminent visual computing platform, trusted by millions of
creative and technical professionals to accelerate their workflows. With Quadro vDWS
software, you can deliver the most powerful virtual workstation from the data center.
Designers and artists can work more efficiently, leveraging high performance virtual
workstations that perform just like physical workstations. IT has the flexibility to provision
render nodes and virtual workstations, scaling resources up or down as needed. An NVIDIA
Quadro vDWS solution can be configured to deliver multiple virtual workstations customized
for specific tasks. This means that utilization of compute resources can be optimized, and
virtual machines can be adjusted to handle workflows that may demand more or less memory.
To deploy an NVIDIA vGPU solution for Autodesk Maya 2020 with Arnold, you will need an
NVIDIA GPU that is supported with Quadro vDWS software, licensed for each concurrent user.

3.4 VMware vSphere

VMware vSphere provides a powerful, flexible, and secure foundation for business agility that
accelerates your digital transformation to hybrid cloud and success in the digital economy.
With vSphere, you can support new workloads and use cases while keeping pace with the
growing needs and complexity of your infrastructure. vSphere is the heart of a secure software
defined data center (SDDC). With SDDC securing applications, data, infrastructure, and access
has never been easier. Advanced security capabilities fully integrated into the hypervisor and
powered by machine learning, provide better visibility, protection and faster response times for
security incidents. vSphere helps you run, manage, connect and secure your applications in a
common operating environment across the hybrid cloud.

3.5 Teradici Cloud Access Software

Teradici is the creator of the industry-leading PCoIP remoting protocol technology and Cloud
Access software. Teradici Cloud Access software enables enterprises to securely deliver high
performance graphics-intensive applications and workstations from private data centers,
public clouds or hybrid environments with crisp text clarity, true color accuracy and lossless
image quality to any endpoint, anywhere.
Teradici PCoIP Ultra with Quadro vDWS can provide virtual machines to multiple artists
resulting in virtual machines that are indistinguishable from physical workstations. Artists can
enjoy workspaces set up on the latest hardware, and work with confidence in high fidelity with
steady frame rates.

NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Work station Sizing Guide SP-09980-001_v02 | 5
Chapter 4. Autodesk Maya and Arnold
PoC Testing

To determine the optimal configuration of Quadro vDWS for Autodesk Maya and Arnold, both
user performance and scalability were considered. For comparative purposes, we considered
the requirements for a configuration optimized for performance only, and this configuration is
based solely on performance using sample artistic workflows. The scenes used within our
POC testing focused on a VFX pipeline where a single shot is the result of several artist
specialists working on different pieces. The following illustration shows the entire 3D
production pipeline and illustrates the areas where our POC testing focused.

Figure 4-1. 3D Production Pipeline

NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Work station Sizing Guide SP-09980-001_v02 | 6
 Autodesk Maya and Arnold PoC Testing

Our testing focused on a few of the phases illustrated in Figure 4-1. We executed three GPU-
accelerated artistic workflows within 4 VM’s:
 VM1 and VM2 - Modeling, Texturing and Shading
 VM3 - Animation
 VM4 - Lighting and Rendering
The goal of this testing was to show how four artists from three unique parts of the pipeline
can all work at the same time using shared server virtualized resources and be productive.
The following paragraphs goes into further detail of each of these workflows.

4.1 VM1 and VM2 - Modeling, Texturing

and Shading
For artists to model effectively, they need fast interaction with their models to see different
views, quick material changes, and realistic rendering. This workflow takes advantage of the
NVIDIA® TensorRT ™ cores in the NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate the rendering process, and artists
can view their noiseless assets by leveraging NVIDIA OptiX™ AI Denoising. The GPU memory
needed to support this artist would be considered small to medium, therefore a single VM was
assigned half of the Quadro RTX 6000 GPU, which equates to a 12Q vGPU profile. Two VM’s can
share the same GPU on a server. The following screenshot illustrates the artist’s work.

Figure 4-2. VM Modeling, Texturing and Shading Example

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 Autodesk Maya and Arnold PoC Testing

In order to bring characters to life in film, they need to go through a “Look Development”
process. In the example illustration in Figure 4-2, Autodesk’s Arnold GPU Renderer utilizes
NVIDIA RTX compatible features for performant ray tracing. Look Development involves the
following:
 Refining textures and materials that often result in a time-consuming, back and forth
process
 Real time updates with NVIDIA RTX™ technology allow for artistic interaction to accurately
dial in the look of the character, in-context to the scene.
 NVIDIA RTX AI, employing NVIDIA OptiX Denoiser, provides high-fidelity changes in real
time.
 Artists can define and deliver higher quality content in a more intuitive workflow providing
an overall increase in production value.
Having a full color range without compression is important to make accurate changes in
confidence. Teradici PCoIP Ultra, which takes advantage of NVIDIA RTX GPU encoding,
ensures that the virtual machines look indistinguishable from a local display.

4.2 VM3 - Animation

For artists to animate effectively, artists need smooth playback with no pauses or stutters as
they make pose changes. Since this artist uses the Maya 2020 GPU animation cache, the GPU
memory needed to support this artist would be considered large. Therefore, a single VM was
assigned an entire Quadro RTX 6000 GPU, which equates to a 24Q vGPU profile. The following
screenshot illustrates the artist’s work.

Figure 4-3. VM3 Animation Example

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 Autodesk Maya and Arnold PoC Testing

Animation production can place extreme demands on compute hardware. Traditional

workflows involve artists outputting time-consuming preview videos. Since Autodesk Maya
2019, real time animation playback and preview is now possible. Furthermore, with Viewport
2.0 enhancements, real-time rendering features are also available. In this scene, we are using
the GPU to cache animation, and preview ambient occlusion, shadows, lights and reflections,
all in real-time in the viewport. Maya Viewport 2.0 leverages GPU memory to deliver high
quality materials, lights, screen space ambient occlusion and more - at interactive speed.
Starting in Maya 2019, you can use your GPU to cache animation calculations to memory in a
fraction of the time of a CPU cache. With this feature, you can playback your animations in real
time, and continue to tweak and update your shots without having to play blast the timeline.
By leveraging NVIDIA RTX GPU encoding with PCoIP Ultra, this VM is able to deliver
interactive, real time animation playback without dropping any frames, which is really
important to animators who are constantly reviewing their changes. Every frame counts.

4.3 VM4 - Lighting and Rendering

Artists who work with lighting and rendering, need fast resolution of the full image so they can
see the impact of their lighting and camera changes. Since this artist is the user who most
intensely uses the NVIDIA TensorRT cores in the NVIDIA GPUs (for accelerating the rendering
process), the GPU memory needed to support this artist is the largest of all and may even
need acceleration from multiple GPUs. NVIDIA vGPU technology provides administrators the
ability to assign up to four shared GPUs to a single VM. The following screenshot illustrates
the artist’s work.

Figure 4-4. VM4 Lighting and Rendering Example

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 Autodesk Maya and Arnold PoC Testing

Lighting and rendering are resource intensive processes that are responsible for the final
output of a scene. NVIDIA Quadro vDWS enables artists to work and adjust scenes while
utilizing leftover GPU resources to render. This provides for an incredibly efficient use of GPU
resources, furthering the production pipeline workflow.

4.4 Evaluating vGPU Frame Buffer

The GPU Profiler is a tool which can be installed within each of the VM’s and used for
evaluating GPU to CPU utilization rates while executing the aforementioned artistic workflows.
The vGPU frame buffer is allocated out of the physical GPU frame buffer at the time the vGPU
is assigned to the VM and the NVIDIA vGPU retains exclusive use of that frame buffer. All
vGPUs resident on a physical GPU share access to the GPUs engines including the graphic 3D,
video decode, and video encode engines. Since user behavior varies and is a critical factor in
determining the best GPU and profile size, it is highly recommended to profile your own data
and workflows during your PoC to properly size your environment for optional performance.

NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Work station Sizing Guide SP-09980-001_v02 | 10
Chapter 5. Findings

Our testing showed that four artists from three unique parts of the pipeline can all effectively
do their 3D production work using VMs. To determine the optimal configuration of Quadro
vDWS to support these four artists, both user performance and scalability were considered. To
further support this conclusion, NVIDIA collected insights from Media and Entertainment
customers as well, to understand how animation studio customers are deploying Quadro
vDWS. A dual socket, 2U rack server configured with three Quadro RTX 6000 GPUs provided
the necessary resources so that 3D production artists could work more efficiently, leveraging
high-performance virtual workstations which perform just like physical workstations. When
sizing a Quadro vDWS deployment for Autodesk Maya and Arnold, NVIDIA recommends
conducting your own PoC to fully analyze resource utilization using objective measurements
and subjective feedback. It is highly recommended that you install the GPU Profiler within your
artist VMs to properly size your VMs.

NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Work station Sizing Guide SP-09980-001_v02 | 11
Chapter 6. Deployment Best Practices

6.1 Run a Proof of Concept

The most successful deployments are those that balance user density (scalability) with
performance. This is achieved when Quadro vDWS-powered virtual machines are used in
production while objective measurements and subjective feedback from end users is gathered.
We highly recommend a PoC is run prior to doing a full deployment to provide a better
understanding of how your users work and how many GPU resources they really need,
analyzing the utilization of all resources, both physical and virtual. Consistently analyzing
resource utilization and gathering subjective feedback allows for optimizing the configuration
to meet the performance requirements of end users while optimizing the configuration for
best scale.

Table 6-1. Metrics for a Successful PoC Example

Objective Measurements Subjective Feedback
Loading time of application Overall user experience
Loading time of dataset Application performance
Utilization (CPU, GPU, Networking Zooming and panning experience

6.2 Leverage Management and

Monitoring Tools
Quadro vDWS software provides extensive monitoring features enabling IT to better
understand usage of the various engines of an NVIDIA GPU. The utilization of the compute
engine, the frame buffer, the encoder, and decoder can all be monitored and logged through a
command line interface called the NVIDIA System Management Interface (nvidia-smi),
accessed on the hypervisor or within the virtual machine. In addition, NVIDIA vGPU metrics are
integrated with Windows Performance Monitor (PerfMon) and through management packs like
VMware vRealize Operations.
To identify bottlenecks of individual end users or of the physical GPU serving multiple end
users, execute the following nvidia-smi commands on the hypervisor.

NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Work station Sizing Guide SP-09980-001_v02 | 12
 Deployment Best Practices

Virtual Machine Frame Buffer Utilization:

nvidia-smi vgpu -q -l 5 | grep -e "VM ID" -e "VM Name" -e "Total" -e "Used"
-e "Free"
Virtual Machine GPU, Encoder and Decoder Utilization:
nvidia-smi vgpu -q -l 5 | grep -e "VM ID" -e "VM Name" -e "Utilization" -e
"Gpu" -e "Encoder" -e "Decoder"

Physical GPU, Encoder and Decoder Utilization:

nvidia-smi -q -d UTILIZATION -l 5 | grep -v -e "Duration" -e "Number" -e
"Max" -e "Min" -e "Avg" -e "Memory" -e "ENC" -e "DEC" -e "Samples"

6.3 Understand Your Users

Another benefit of performing a PoC prior to deployment is that it enables more accurate
categorization of user behavior and GPU requirements for each virtual workstation.
Customers often segment their end users into user types for each application and bundle
similar user types on a host. Light users can be supported on a smaller GPU and smaller
profile size while heavy users require more GPU resources, a large profile size, and may be
best supported on a larger GPU like the Quadro RTX 8000 for example.

6.4 Understanding the GPU Scheduler

NVIDIA Quadro vDWS provides three GPU scheduling options to accommodate a variety of QoS
requirements of customers.
 Fixed share scheduling: Always guarantees the same dedicated quality of service.
The fixed share scheduling policies guarantee equal GPU performance across all vGPUs
sharing the same physical GPU. Dedicated quality of service simplifies a POC since it
allows the use of common benchmarks used to measure physical workstation
performance such as SPECviewperf, to compare the performance with current physical or
virtual workstations.
 Best effort scheduling1: Provides consistent performance at a higher scale and therefore
reduces the TCO per user. This is the default scheduler.
The best effort scheduler leverages a round-robin scheduling algorithm which shares GPU
resources based on actual demand which results in optimal utilization of resources. This
results in consistent performance with optimized user density. The best effort scheduling
policy best utilizes the GPU during idle and not fully utilized times, allowing for optimized
density and a good QoS.
 Equal share scheduling: Provides equal GPU resources to each running VM. As vGPUs are
added or removed, the share of GPU processing cycles allocated changes accordingly,
resulting in performance to increase when utilization is low, and decrease when utilization
is high.

NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Work station Sizing Guide SP-09980-001_v02 | 13
 Deployment Best Practices

Organizations typically leverage the best effort GPU scheduler policy for their deployment to
achieve better utilization of the GPU, which usually results in supporting more users per
server with a lower quality of service (QoS) and better TCO per user.

Note:
1
Available since 2013 when NVIDIA virtual GPU technology was first introduced.

NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Work station Sizing Guide SP-09980-001_v02 | 14
Chapter 7. Summary

A qualified OEM server configured with three Quadro RTX 6000 GPUs provided the necessary
resources for 3D production artists to work more efficiently, leveraging high performance
virtual workstations which perform just like physical workstations. When sizing a Quadro
vDWS deployment for Autodesk Maya and Arnold, NVIDIA recommends conducting your own
PoC to fully analyze resource utilization using objective measurements and subjective
feedback. NVIDIA Quadro vDWS offers flexibility to IT administrators to size VMs based on
workload or workflow needs.
Access NVIDIA vGPU software today by downloading a 90-day free trial evaluation. Or learn
more about Quadro vDWS software on our product webpage.

NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Work station Sizing Guide SP-09980-001_v02 | 15
Appendix A. Solution Configuration and
Details

Table A-1 outlines the system configuration utilized to complete the rigorous NVIDIA NVQual
verification along with the Autodesk Maya, Autodesk Arnold, and Teradici software packages
all in line with the NVIDIA solution validation process.

Table A-1. Solution Components

Components Vendor, Model, and Quantity Details
System Dual socket, 2U Rack server CPU: 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6154
Memory: 384 GB DDR4-2933
Storage: Detached
OS: Windows 10 / CentOS 7.7
Graphics 3x Quadro RTX 6000 GPU memory: 24 GB
Quadro driver release: 430 U2 NVIDIA® CUDA® cores: 4,608
[430.64] or later Tensor cores: 576
TensorRT cores: 72
Graphics software NVIDIA Quadro Virtual 12GB frame buffer per user example:
Workstation Software • GRID_RTX6000-12Q: 2 users
24GB frame buffer per user example:
• GRID_RTX6000-24Q: 1 user
• GRID_RTX6000-24Q: 1user
Hypervisor VMware vSphere 6.7U1 or later Enterprise Plus edition or higher:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/com
pare.html
https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalm
arketing/vmware/en/pdf/products/vsphere/vmw
are-vsphere-desktop-faqs.pdf
Application and Teradici Cloud Access Software
software Autodesk Maya 2020
Autodesk Arnold 6

NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Work station Sizing Guide SP-09980-001_v02 | 16
 Summary

A.1 Server Recommendation: Dual

Socket, 2U Rack Server
A 2RU, 2-socket server configured with two Intel Xeon Gold 6154 processors is recommended.
With a high-frequency 3.0 GHz combined with 18-cores, this CPU is well-suited for optimal
performance for each end user while supporting the highest user scale, making it a cost-
effective solution for Autodesk Maya.

A.2 Flash Based Storage for Best

Performance
The use of flash-based storage, such as solid-state drives (SSDs) are recommended for
optimal performance. Flash-based storage is the common choice for users on physical
workstations and similar performance can be achieved in similarly configured virtual
environments.
A typical configuration for non-persistent virtual machines is to use the direct attached
storage (DAS) on the server in a RAID 5 or RAID 10 configuration. For persistent virtual
machines, a high performing all-flash storage solution is the preferred option.

A.3 Typical Networking Configuration for

Quadro vDWS
There is no typical network configuration for in a Quadro vDWS powered virtual environment
since this varies based on multiple factors including choice of hypervisor, persistent versus
non-persistent virtual machines, and choice of storage solution. Most customers are using 10
GbE networking for optimal performance.

A.4 Optimizing for Dedicated Quality of

Service
For comparative purposes, we considered the requirements for a configuration optimized for
performance only. This configuration option does not take into account the need to further
optimize for scale, or user density. Additionally, this configuration option is based solely on
performance using the aforementioned sample 3D production artistic workflows.

NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Work station Sizing Guide SP-09980-001_v02 | 17
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