Announcing the Dell Precision Appliance for Wyse

Dell recently announced the Precision Appliance for Wyse. This appliance is targeted at high end graphics users and comes with several ISV certifications with more on the way. The appliance is built on the Precision Rack 7910 server with NVIDIA graphics cards and Teradici host cards depending on the configuration (please see table for specific details for each solution). The appliance comes in two flavors- the direct graphics and shared graphics appliance.

The direct graphics appliance has three NVIDIA Quadro K4200 cards that provide vDGA or direct graphics (pass-through for the Citrix folks reading this) to 3 users. Each NVIDIA card is plugged into a Teradici Tera2220 PCIe card with two cables-one for each monitor. The Teradici cards provide a seamless end user experience. This is the highest-end configuration available with this appliance and supports a maximum of three users. The only protocol supported is PCOIP and so VMware ESX and VMware view are the only Hypervisor and broker combination that is compatible with this solution.

The shared GPU appliance has two NVIDIA GRID K2A cards that provide a shared GPU “pool” to either 4 or 8 users. The appliance been tested with two vGPU profiles- K280Q and the K260Q and so support 4 or 8 users respectively. While the profiles were chosen to match customer needs for a high-end graphics workstation solution, they can be changed by the administrator to use lower end profiles to support more users (The different NVIDIA profiles available are discussed in one of my previous articles available here: (http://dell.to/1IdKnLU).

The list of ISV certifications that the appliance currently has is Siemens (NX, Teamcenter & Tecnomatix) and PTC (Creo). More certifications from vendors like Autodesk and Dassault Systems like AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor and Solidworks are being worked on as we speak!

Dell has invested in a Quick Start Tool (QST) that vastly simplifies the deployment of this appliance (host PCI pass-through configuration, creating virtual machines, etc.). It can be downloaded from the Dell support site here and installed on any Windows system running Windows 7 or 8 or Servers 2008 R2 or 2012 R2. The installer is less than 30 MB in size and hardly takes up any resources on the system it is installed on. It does require that .NET 4.0 be installed and that is the only requirement. The QST is easy to install-3 mouse clicks with no options (Click Next and Install) and you’re done. The actual deployment-creation of virtual machines and graphics configuration (pass-through or vGPU) is also very simple and the number of steps has been reduced from 102 when done manually to 10 with the QST. I have created a walk-through video available here.

So, if you’re looking for high-end graphics workstations that are certified by ISV’s and can enable your end users to have a similar or better experience by shifting from physical desktops (or some sort of virtual installation) to a truly high-end solution, look no further!