SolidWorks Virtual setup

[mitkonsult]

A customer of mine asked for our help finding and setting up a virtualized SolidWorks environment. The idea is simply to have their two Solid licenses installed on two VMs and then the engineers would work via Citrix/RDC. What would be an efficient way to do this? 

My idea, roughly, would be to install VMWare V-Sphere Enterprise on a Dell Server (Fast SSD RAID, 1-2 CPUs, big RAM). The server would have a graphic card and vGPU enabled. Two VMs with one Solid license each. The engineers would then logon to the available VM when needed. Would this work? And would a Nvidia T4 be "enough"?

[mitkonsult]

Anyone?

[Scott Vessey]

This might help: https://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/11168_enu_html.htm

 

[mitkonsult]

Thanks but I need something more concrete. If anyone has been virtualizing Solidworks, that is.

[fabio1975]

Ciao 

For a customer a few years ago we implemented a Horizon solution with VDI (using the PCoIP protocol and thin-client with teradici OS).

VDI VMs are used for technical drawing and have SolidWorks (version 16 quite old) on board.
Currently, the infrastructure has NVIDIA Tesla M60 cards with 1 or 2GB profiles.

The same customer asked us for an evaluation of new vSAN-based infrastructure with NVIDIA A10 or A40 cards
Initially, the infrastructure consisting of 3 ESXi nodes with SSD external storage worked well (there were few VMs 15 and the CPU and vCPU ratio was good) now the VMs are 32 and the environment works but with some slowdowns in the use of SolidWorks .
The choice between A10 and A40 depends on the density of cards.
Solidworks recommends for high performance the use of memory profiles of video cards of at least 8GB on the VMs
ESXi host CPUs must have a high frequency (We are evaluating the Intel Core i7-11700K / Intel Core i9-11900K or AMD Ryzen 9 5950X / AMD Ryzen 9 5900X

I hope I have given you useful information