Items tagged with Virtualization
One of the features supported by NVIDIA's line of professional graphics cards is GPU virtualization. It is a potentially handy feature in some environments, as it enables more than one person to tap into a single GPU, through virtualization software. The feature is not officially available on NVIDIA's consumer GPUs, but as it turns out, can enabled with a rather simple hack. This is really more of a 'gee-whiz' kind of thing than a game changer in the land of consumer GPUs, as we reckon the vast majority of GeForce graphics card owners will not have a need for this. For those who do, however, there is the potential to save a lot of money by buying a consumer graphics card rather than a professional...
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An anonymous security researcher who goes by the handle Sick Codes is gaining attention again. The last time we saw them, they found a backdoor into TCL Android TVs, but now they have moved onto Apple devices. The researcher created a tool that generates "macOS valid serials, uuids, and board serials" and posted it to GitHub. This could help speed up development and research in the Apple ecosystem, although it totally flies in the face of Apple licensing guidelines. macOS is not an operating system people typically think of when it comes to scaling or even virtualization. Developers and researchers would typically need to buy an Apple product to get their hands on macOS, unlike Windows or Linux,...
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NVIDIA is making its high-powered Tesla GPU servers even more useful today with the launch of what it calls Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstation Software, or Quadro vDWS. Quadro vDWS allows users to run heavy rendering operations and high-performance computing workloads within a virtualized environment. These applications can then be streamed to a laptop or virtual workstation that otherwise wouldn’t have the compute power necessary to handle such tasks. Quadro vDWS is optimized for Pascal-based Tesla GPU accelerators with up to 24GB of onboard memory, with those resources being divided up amongst multiple users based on their needs. NVIDIA claims that Quadro vDWS offers twice the performance...
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NVIDIA today introduced a new graphics card option for its GRID virtual desktop platform. It's the Tesla M10 and it's intended to make it more affordable for businesses to deliver virtualized desktops to all of their employees through a subscription model that starts at just $2 per user, per month (when signing up with a 3-year plan). The pitch from NVIDIA is that business applications have grown beyond simple documents and spreadsheets where 2D acceleration was sufficient. Modern applications, including Outlook, Office 2016, web browsers, Adobe Photoshop, and even Windows 10 can all take advantage of GPU acceleration. It's a trend that's not going to change, and that's where the Tesla M10 comes...
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In a case of Xzibit’s “Yo Dawg!” meets Inception, Microsoft is “going deeper” with virtualization in Windows 10. Although the company didn’t make note of the added functionality when it announced Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 10565, the operating system now supports nested virtualization. Nested virtualization leverages hardware virtualization (i.e. AMD-V and Intel VT-x) with a twist. In a typical Hyper-V environment, hardware virtualization capabilities are kept hidden from guest virtual machines — therefore, its cannot take advantage of Hyper-V. However, nested virtualization allows guest virtual machines to “see” that hardware virtualization is supported, thus allowing a cascading level...
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Data security research player CrowdStrike is reporting a security flaw that could allow hackers to exploit and take over data centers from within. Given the nasty moniker "VENOM" (for "Virtualized Environment Neglected Operations Manipulation"), the vulnerability CrowdStrike uncovered is present in a common component — a legacy floppy drive controller — that is widely used in virtualization platforms and appliances. The seriousness of the VENOM vulnerability rests on how it circumvents an essential barrier used by cloud service providers to segregate customer data. Thus, infiltrators who are able to gain access to one virtual environment can subsequently move from there into the cloud entity's...
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Dell is targeting a wide range of businesses with its new Precision Appliance for Wyse, which is designed to handle heavy graphics workloads. The virtual desktop offering is designed to support just about any kind of endpoint businesses need to use, including thin clients and laptops. Dell is touting the appliance at the first ISV certified virtual workstation appliance in the industry. “How people work today is rapidly changing,” said Dell executive director Andy Rhodes in a statement. “Our customers are looking at ways to be more mobile and collaborative without sacrificing performance or user experience. The Dell Precision Appliance for Wyse combines our expertise in both high performance workstation capabilities...
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Today, at ARM TechCon, AMD is kicking off the conference by launching its new embedded ARM platform (codenamed Hierofalcon) and its associated ARM Cortex-A57 chip, codenamed Seattle. This new solution is debuting inside the first ARM-based network function virtualization platform, and is meant as a proof-of-concept demonstration that shows AMD can build enterprise networking hardware around an ARM platform and that the chip can handle data migration from an x86 platform. Network Function Virtualization? What's That? To understand the play AMD is making here, it helps to delve just a little into the world of big iron industrial networking. In the past, network flow control has been dominated by...
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NVIDIA's GRID is a virtual GPU technology that allows for hardware acceleration in a virtual environment. It's designed to run in concert with products from Citrix, VMWare, and Microsoft, and to address some of the weaknesses of these applications. The problem with many conventional Virtual Desktop Interfaces (VDIs) is that they're often either too slow for advanced graphics work or unable to handle 3D workloads at all. Now, with GRID, NVIDIA is claiming that it can offer a vGPU passthrough solution that allows remote users to access a virtualized desktop environment built around a high-end CPU and GPU. The test systems the company is using for these 24-hour test drives all use a GRID K520. That's...
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When NVIDIA first announced that it would create a workstation-class remote virtualization system that enabled full GPU acceleration with latency-free streaming I was more than a little skeptical. Not only did it seem like a solution in search of a problem, the bandwidth requirements and technical heavy-lifting to support professional PC users seemed too steep to surmount in a few short years. Then, this week, NVIDIA announced that it would offer a free 24-hour test drive of NVIDIA GRID to anyone who wanted to see what the technology could do. We took the company up on its offer and what we've seen is damned impressive. Understanding NVIDIA GRID NVIDIA's GRID is a virtual GPU technology that...
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With the release of VMware View 5.3 vDGA, VMware is deploying NVIDIA’s GRID rendering technology which allows better virtualization of graphically intensive applications in an enterprise environment. We’ve seen NVIDIA demo this technology before, and although it can certainly be used for cloud gaming, GRID offers a server package that can substitute for desktop-side workstation-level graphics. NVIDIA GRID demo “NVIDIA GRID GPU Pass-Through technology makes this possible by allowing a virtual machine running VMware View 5.3 on top of the VMware ESX hypervisor to talk directly to a dedicated GRID GPU,” wrote NVIDIA’s Justin Boitano in a blog post. GRID is intriguing...
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OCZ has released more details of the VXL 1.3 cache and virtualization software it teased before this week’s CeBIT 2013 in Hannover, Germany, and the upgraded offering includes virtualized “SAN-less”, highly available, fault tolerant environments courtesy of the software’s new synchronous data mirroring capabilities. The idea is to prevent data loss and virtual machine downtime at all times. The software maintains two identical, live copies of virtual machine data by mirroring the information across OCZ Z-Drive R4 PCIe cards (have a peek at our review of the card for more info), which accomplishes the task of keeping two copies of the data and also leverages the PCIe cards’...
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AMD is launching its new FirePro R5000 today in a bid to gain traction in the remote graphics market. The company has partnered with the workstation graphics virtualization company Teradici to create a GPU that's specifically designed for this type of offloading in hardware, as well as software. To make that happen, AMD added Teradici's hardware compression chip to a workstation graphics card meant for server deployment. The idea behind Teradici's PCoIP technology is to integrate all of a businesses' workstation hardware into a single datacenter. The PCoIP compression chip makes that possible by transmitting pixel information rather than raw data streams, substantially saving on bandwidth. All...
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Want or need to run Android 4.0 apps on your PC? Chinese start-up SocketeQ has got you covered with its just-released "WindowsAndroid" - perhaps not the most creative name out there, but it's fitting. Given what it's capable of, WindowsAndroid directly competes with BlueStacks, however it goes a step further. What you'll be running is in effect the entire Android OS, not just apps. An example of this can be seen below: The software as it stands today is in all regards a "beta", but the company states that it's readily improving. Still, don't go loading it up expecting even a reasonable Android 4.0 experience, because there are still some stability issues and features missing. OpenGL ES, for example,...
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AMD has announced a new FirePro graphics card at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis conference today (hereafter abbreviated as SC12). It's aimed at server workloads and data center deployments, but it's also the most powerful GPU Sunnyvale has ever deployed, bar none. Rumors of a dual-core Radeon 7990 have floated around since before the HD 7000 series actually debuted, but this is the first time we've seen such a card in the wild. Say hello to the S10000. How does this card fit into AMD's product roadmap? That's a bit complicated. Nvidia has explicitly prepped the K20/K20X for servers and workstations and spent years establishing itself...
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IBM isn't afraid to spend big bucks acquiring companies of all shapes and sizes, hence it should come as no surprise that Big Blue is reportedly close to striking a deal for Red Bend Software, an Israeli firm that deals with mobile software management technology. According to Reuters, the potential deal could be worth anywhere from $200 million to $250 million. IBM is willing to make such a hefty investment because it's drawn to Red Bend Software's mobile virtualization technology, which allows multiple operating systems to be run on a mobile phone. In doing so, phone makers are better able to add embedded services and issue remote updates over-the-air (vRapid Mobile). Image Source: Flickr (Morgaine)...
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Microsoftannounced via the “Building Windows 8” blog yesterday that at least some client versions of Window 8 will natively support virtualization thought the use of Hyper-V, which has formerly been reserved for only server editions of Windows. Microsoft’s goal with virtualization on the client editions of its OS is to provide easy-access to virtual machines to software developers and IT professionals who have the need or desire to work across multiple operating systems. From the blog post, “Whether you are a software developer, an IT administrator, or simply an enthusiast, many of you need to run multiple operating systems, usually on many different machines. Not...
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Lenovo is now offering Virtual Computer NxTop. With NxTop 4.0, IT departments can use a desktop virtualization solution that offers both centralized and distributed storage options for virtual machines. NxTop 4.0 is optimized on select Lenovo Think-branded PCs to deliver unique capabilities, native PC performance, seamless user experience, and zero-touch PC deployment through a Lenovo custom factory install. New features of NxTop 4 include hot-desking on stateless end-points, VMware vSphere/ESXi and Citrix Xen support, server VMs on PC infrastructure, large scale enterprise installer, and over 50 additional enhancements. Lenovo Extends Cloud Computing Platform with Virtual Computer Desktop Virtualization...
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Dell is adding to its desktop virtualization solutions portfolio with an enhanced Dell Virtual Lab 2.0 solution and new Dell OptiPlex FX170 and FX130 thin clients. The new Virtual Lab 2.0 solution is designed for colleges and universities. It comes with validation testing on six of the most popular applications and Dell anticipates that seven more will be completed by the end of the year. The new OptiPlex thin client solutions offer mobile, contract, remote and task workers connectivity within a desktop virtualization infrastructure. The FX170 is designed for knowledge-based workers focused on multimedia and content creation, while the FX130 is ideal for application and task-based environments....
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Intel launched its much-anticipated Nehalem-EX processor today; the new chip could redefine performance at 4P and above. Nehalem-EX, aka Beckton, aka Xeon 6500/7500 is Nehalem at full throttle; Beckton is an eight-core/16-thread processor with up to 24MB of L3 cache or ~3MB per core compared to Nehalem's 2MB/core design. It supports up to four QPI links for glueless design implementations and features a quad-channel memory controller capable of controlling up to 16 DIMMs per socket. Intel has released a number of SKUs with different core counts, one without Hyper-Threading, varying amounts of L3 cache, and clockspeeds ranging from 1.73GHz-2.26GHz for the Hyper-Threaded CPUs and 2.66GHz one model...
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Today VMware announced the latest release of its virtualization application for the Mac, VMware Fusion 3. VMware Fusion allows Windows and Windows apps to be installed and run on Macs. While the release of the third official version of Fusion--with its "more than 50 new features"--might seemingly be meaningful to only a small group of Mac owners who need access to a handful of specific Windows applications, there is an aspect to this release that might have a much larger appeal to gamers: VMware Fusion 3 now includes DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3 and OpenGL 2.1 support.One of the reasons why the Mac hasn't had anywhere near the same market share as Windows systems is that the Mac has never really...
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Later this month, LG Electronics plans to start selling flat screen monitors that can function as virtual computers. These monitors will help users save costs by allowing multiple users to run programs off of a single PC.The new LCD SmartVine N-series monitors will utilize embedded virtualization technology from U.S.-based NComputing. This technology is based on the idea that today’s computers are so powerful that many applications use only a small fraction of the computer’s capacity. NComputing’s virtualization enables many users to tap the unused capacity and share the computer as if each had their own machine.Because LG Electronics is embedding NComputing virtualization circuitry inside the...
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