Depending on the card, up to 24 VMs can share a GPU, and some cards have multiple GPUs. On the hypervisor, a vSphere Installation Bundle (VIB) is installed, which aids or performs the scheduling.
You need to install the appropriate vendor driver in the guest operating system of the VM, and all graphics commands are passed directly to the GPU without having to be translated by the hypervisor.
The difference from vSGA is that the proprietary VMware 3D driver is not used, and most of the graphics card’s features are supported. Virtual shared pass-through graphics acceleration allows a graphical processing unit to be shared with multiple users instead of focused on only one user. Virtual Shared Pass-Through Graphics Acceleration
For a full list of compatible vSGA cards, see the VMware Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration Guide. Important: Some examples of supported vSGA cards for Horizon 7 and later, and vSphere 7 are NVIDIA Tesla M6/M10/M60/P4/P6/P40 cards. Drawbacks of vSGA are that applications might need to be recertified to be supported, API support is limited, and support is restricted for the various versions of OpenGL and DirectX. Each VM uses a proprietary VMware vSGA 3D driver that communicates with the vendor driver in the VMware vSphere® host. A vendor driver needs to be installed in the hypervisor. With vSGA, the physical GPUs in the host are virtualized and shared across multiple virtual machines (VMs). vSGA is generally used for knowledge workers and, occasionally, for power users. However, vSGA can create bottlenecks, depending on which applications are used, and the resources these applications require from the GPU. It is an attractive solution for users who require the full potential of the GPU’s capability during brief periods. Virtual shared graphics acceleration (vSGA) allows a GPU to be shared across multiple virtual desktops.
Later sections provide installation and configuration instructions, as well as best practices and troubleshooting.
It begins with typical use cases and matches these use cases to the three types of graphics acceleration, explaining the differences. This guide describes hardware-accelerated graphics in VMware virtual desktops in VMware Horizon®. In addition, in areas such as oil and gas, space exploration, aerospace, engineering, science, and manufacturing, individuals with these advanced requirements must be located in the same physical location as the workstation. These standalone workstations carry high acquisition and maintenance costs. Engineers, designers, and scientists have traditionally relied on dedicated graphics workstations to perform the most demanding tasks, such as manipulating 3D models and visually analyzing large data sets.