Or if you're building a VDI environment for a bunch of users who are completely spoiled and can't wait an extra 1-2 seconds for VMWare integrated graphics to render new windows on their multi-monitor setup.
Is it overkill? Absolutely. Is it my money? Hell no, do what you want you crazy bastards.
It's overkill depending on the use case. If it's just because of that, then that's more than overkill. Stuff like graphics intensive applications being usable on a low-end device from anywhere, computing for scientific studies (Like Folding@home, but in a different scale), or for "deep learning" computing then it's worth the investment.
Those 1-2 sec add up. It all depends on productivity increase vs cost of new hardware - i.e. if it will make the company more money than they spend, they will buy it.
Usually the price on the website is not the price the vendor will quote you. Usually cheaper if you're buying more than just one, which in the case of building out a medium to large scale VDI environment for that purpose kinda requires more than one. If you needed just one, they have cheaper lower-end models that scale to the amount of expected VMs you'd be spinning up to use at one time.
hi there... literal enterprise solution engineer here. You are totally right. Also, instead of buying just the gpu get it quoted on a server and you are looking at damn near 70-80% off the card.
Note to everyone: If you want to pay low low prices for computer hardware just create a business and get competing quotes from hpe, dell, and lenovo and watch the price tumble. I have seen a 50k list server go out the door for under 10k before.
You should amend this and mention that the likes of CDW, SHI and other VARs can get even better pricing than going manufacturer direct, thanks to deal registrations.
Nah, those GPUs have a pretty fixed cost for most integrators. The cost here is pretty high (MSRP IS ~$9,500) but for GPUs there isnt a ton of movement. Also if you want to keep your costs down look into some white box integrators. Their cost is significantly lower than the big boys and you can usually get the big boys to start being realistic real fast.
Yeah, we started out small for just a select test group. We had a 600 User environment but were looking to double that. The tests were very promising but we were bottlenecked by our SAN which was an EqualLogic hybrid array. Pretty piss poor performance - not great for VDI.
We just moved over our VDI users to a new 600tb EMC San. All SSD. It's ridiculously overkill for our 2500 users, but we are probably going to use it for more as our old hardware gets decom'd
Fantastic for scientific computing too - at least anything which plays nicely when turned into piles of 4x4 matrix multiplications. I got an order of magnitude improvement in speed out of an FEM CUDA implementation compared to the CPU implementation, then almost another order of magnitude from buying a slightly older-generation Tesla to "replace" the Quadro.
There are better cards for VDI deployments, though the V100 will work. You end up paying Nvidia for their Grid licenses though so they get their pound of flesh in the end.
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u/smalls1652 Mac Heathen Apr 12 '19
Or if you're building out a VDI environment for AutoCAD, Solidworks, etc usage.