10Zig and DataCenter Gaming

Want a way to bust those January blues? Want to game from your DC? Well if you have spare server kicking around or at least one you don’t mind shutting down and it has VT-D extensions enabled I would have a chat with 10Zig and grab a VMware Horizon demo. Why…. Well here is why

You of course will also need a compatible GPU but I found that a Quadro K2000 I had access to did more than an ample job to prove this in concept.

I ran this very brief POC on a HP DL380 G7, VMware 5.5 and a small iSCSI RAID 5 LUN and got these results. I would be amazed to know what I could have got with more tuning and an SSD or two. As you can see it got around 120FPS at points so pretty good going.

I am going to do a full post on the 10Zig clients as well as they put simply they rock and I would like to test them further. I would love to do a true show down of RDP, PCoIP and also Citrix. From this it would be good to see how Citrix XenDesktop compare against VMware Horizon in a head to head app demo.

I did try a few other older games but I had issue getting them going but either way it’s an interesting notion that you can get full 3D graphics from your data canter. Maybe this is also a good way at last to get some of your Adobe fans (Also Mac users) within VDI as you can at last really provide them a true GPU and support. It also can hopefully satisfy your DR plans as who has a Mac spare or a high end graphics machine for when disaster happens!

*These views are my own and may not be the same as my employer.