Removal of vSGA hardware acceleration support for NVIDIA GPUs

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi
• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

With GRID 17.x, NVIDIA removed support for vSGA for all GPUs except Tesla M10. vSGA is not supported for NVIDIA Turing (T4, RTX 6000, RTX 8000) and newer GPUs. vSGA support for NVIDIA Volta and pre-Maxwell GPUs, is already deprecated by NVIDIA.

In a future vSphere release, vSGA hardware acceleration support for the following NVIDIA GPUs will be removed:

• NVIDIA Maxwell (e.g. Tesla M6, Tesla M10, Tesla M60)
• NVIDIA Pascal (e.g. Tesla P4, Tesla P6, Tesla P40)

A VI-Admin can migrate their hardware accelerated workloads to use other GPUs with vSGA functionality, for information on how to setup vSGA see the link Setup Your Environment for vSGA.

Environment

vSphere 8.0 U3 and future vSphere releases

Cause

NVIDIA deprecation of vSGA support in GRID 17 and future GRID releases.

Resolution

Workaround:

Starting with vSphere 8.0 U3, below are recommended steps for migration of workloads:

1. Power Off your hardware accelerated vSGA VMs
2. Obtain a vSphere host with a GPU that has vSGA support (e.g. Intel Flex 140 or Flex 170)
3. Locate and Download a vSGA driver for your GPU by selecting a product and searching for "vSGA" under the "Drivers & Tools", see KB Finding IO Drivers in the Broadcom Support Portal
4. Configure vSGA for your host, see Doc Setup Your Environment for vSGA.
5. Migrate the VMs to a host with a GPU that has vSGA support
6. Power On the VM on the new host