NVIDIA Virtual PC (vPC)

Score10 out of 10

8 Reviews and Ratings

What is NVIDIA Virtual PC (vPC)?

NVIDIA Virtual PC (vPC) is a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution provided by NVIDIA. It aims to offer virtualized desktops for knowledge workers in various industries. According to the vendor, vPC provides high-performance graphics and computing capabilities, allowing users to run graphics-rich applications and perform data-intensive tasks without compromising performance. The product is targeted at small to large enterprises and is commonly used by professionals in industries such as finance, healthcare, education, manufacturing, and media and entertainment.

Key Features

Bare Metal Performance: According to the vendor, vPC delivers performance that is virtually indistinguishable from a bare metal environment. Users can run graphics-rich applications and perform data-intensive tasks without sacrificing performance.

Management & Monitoring: The vendor claims that IT administrators can easily manage and monitor the virtualized environment using common data center management tools and workflows. Live migration support ensures continuous uptime and workload availability.

Optimal Resource Utilization: NVIDIA vPC allows for the provisioning of GPU resources with fractional or multi-GPU virtual machine (VM) instances, maximizing resource utilization and cost-effectiveness, as stated by the vendor.

Categories & Use Cases

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

Craig Nash View profile

Sr. Network Architect in Information Technology at GodAmongGeeks.Com (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

Streaming Game Services.
Dedicated graphics processing form virtual desktop infrastructures, allowing the use of Photoshop, CAD, Video Editing, and more.
Enhanced computing & processing of data thay consists of large amounts of smaller data sets.
Financial based calculations.

Cons

The cost for Nvidia GRID capable hardware is still very high, but is & has been dropping fairly rapidly.
Latency is a large problem for "interaction" based systems (Gaming, remote desktop use) and requires high-speed data, and hosting close to the client.
No real solutions for smaller businesses, but cloud hosting providers like SoftLayer are beginning to offer affordable hosted grid-capable environments.

Return on Investment

Allows us to simplify all of our VDI designs, as power users can be managed like all other cloud users, instead of requiring individual systems.
Provides a way of offering a substantial processing increase for computing/calculations over and above what additional CPUs could offers.
Offers the only "ready-made" solution for on-demand gaming services, after Sony purchased OnLive, and provides an affordable method for startups to enter the Industry.

Alternatives Considered

onlive and AMD live