Video Card performance

[churmsy]

Hi All,

A question about video performance. In Vsphere we now have the video performance settings and this raised a question with me.

Vmware abstracts the guest vm's from the host but provides video resources (along with other resources) to it.

How does Vmware do this; does it utilise system memory and it's own video driver or leverage what video capability the host has as it does with memory and cpu.

if it utilises it's own hardware can you boost performance by enhancing the video card either through more video card memory or through a faster graphics card.

Can anyone enlighten me?

[RParker]

I don't think its performance, its capability.

The extra memory allows you to get higher resolution, and that's all. You still can't virtualize a Video Card in a VM, so you can't pass the video to the VM and therefore not matter what the Video Card is you will not gain any performance benefit.

[churmsy]

Thanks for the reply.

It's the underlying esx-i performance that I'm considering. The host will be presented with whatever ESX can provide through it's abstracted drivers.

My suspicion is as you say the guest OS won't utilise any video memory itself but use system memory but potentially you have a capable GPU and optimised memory to help the VM OS provide video to the hosts as part of it's VM SVGA driver.

For example Server A has the intel basic graphics with zero video memory whilst server B has an ATI PCI-E card with 512 MB (unlikely I know)

I was simply wondering if in Vsphere 4 they may be being that bit cleverer and able to use the extra resources of server B.

[DSTAVERT]

Just guessing but I think that ESXi could be installed without a video card present.