With AMD MxGPU, multiple virtual machines to share an AMD GPU by making the GPU appear as multiple PCI passthrough devices. AMD MxGPU provides direct pass-through to a physical GPU, providing a user with unrestricted, dedicated access to a single GPU.

Before you attempt to create a desktop pool that has capabilities to use AMD MxGPU, you must perform certain configuration tasks on the virtual machines and ESXi hosts.

This overview is an outline of tasks you must perform in vSphere before you can create or configure desktop pools in Horizon 8. For information about enabling GPU device pass-through and adding a PCI device to a virtual machine, see the VMware white paper about graphics acceleration.

  1. Install the graphics card on the ESXi host.
  2. Install the GPU vSphere Installation Bundle (VIB).
  3. Verify that SR-IOV and VT-d or AMD IOMMU are enabled on the ESXi host.
  4. Use the esxcfg-module command to configure the graphics card for SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) .

    See Configuring AMD MxGPU.

  5. Reboot the ESXi host.
  6. Add a PCI device to the virtual machine and select the appropriate PCI device to enable GPU pass-through on the virtual machine.
  7. Verify that the guest virtual machines have virtual hardware version 11 or later.
  8. Reserve all memory when creating the virtual machine.
  9. Configure virtual machine video card 3D capabilities.
  10. Obtain the GPU drivers from the GPU vendor and install the GPU device drivers in the guest operating system of the virtual machine.
  11. Install VMware Tools and Horizon Agent in the guest operating system and reboot.
  12. Set the 3D Renderer option to Manage using vSphere Client.

After you perform these tasks, you must add the virtual machine to a manual desktop pool so that you can access the guest operating system using PCoIP or VMware Blast Extreme. If you attempt to access the virtual machine using a vSphere, the display will show a black screen.