Airbus Group, CH2MHILL and MetroHealth are among the first companies to join VMware and NVIDIA’s early access program to try the latest technology for GPU virtualization and virtual application and desktop infrastructure, ahead of its general availability.

Customers selected to participate in the early access program have deployed a technology preview of the solution. They get to work directly with the engineering teams from both NVIDIA and VMware, and provide direct input about their experiences —influencing future products, training, documentation and services. Interested parties can register for the program at www.nvidia.com/grid-vmware-vgpu.

NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology allows multiple virtual machines to share the power of a single GPU to deliver rich graphics experiences with professional 2D and 3Dapplications.Combined with VMwareHorizon, the technology can deliver a great user experience and the scalability that IT teams require for the most demanding users in their organizations.

Early Customer Reactions

Initial users of the technology include Airbus, the European aircraft-manufacturing giant; CH2M HILL, a global construction and engineering firm; and MetroHealth, a major healthcare provider.

“Airbus decided to implement virtual desktops to streamline end-user access and easily enable suppliers to access major applications supporting Airbus aircraft development. We’re strongly interested in using VMware Horizon with NVIDIA GRID vGPU to offer a scalable and cost-effective solution. The power of the combined offering will allow us to achieve even more efficient business cases.”

– Philippe Muhlhause, Head of EE M&A Architecture and Standards, Airbus

“We’ve had great success to date testing GRID vGPU. The vGPU technology improves scalability and performance for our high-end design engineers, and promises to give a fluid experience to anyone in our company. We are confident that it now finally economically viable for CH2MHILL to provide a VDI farm for graphically demanding workloads across the globe. This could truly transform the way we do business.”

– Craig Fletcher, chief technology officer at CH2MHill

“With GRID vGPU, the graphical compute demands our applications require work exactly as expected, but can now be delivered with VMware Horizon® instead of a physical desktop. This is a key development that brings us one large step closer to delivering on the promise of virtualizing the desktop for all of our users.”

– Aivars Apsite, technology strategist of MetroHealth