After the GPUs were installed, all available full length slots were occupied, and the PCIe SSDs were installed without their brackets. A bit of finagling was required for them to seat properly. Installing the video cards themselves wasn't easy, as the space they fit into is very tight and fitting two double-width cards proved a minor challenge. Initially, I was skeptical that one video card would power on at all, let alone two, but the system handled it with no problem. The riser card replaced an existing one that had two x8 PCIe slots, while the splitters were required to actually power the cards.

The aforementioned PSUs, riser card, and GPU power splitters were all specified by the Dell R720 hardware guide as required for installing one or more GPUs into the host.

The graphics cards used in this test were:ġx Dell 0CPVNF PCIe 16x Riser 3 Expansion Card HDD: 8x 146GB 15K 6Gb SAS Drives in RAID 5 This led me to the following hypothesis.Ĭan I build an ESXi host with two discrete, high-end graphics cards and run two gaming machines off of it?Īs mentioned previously, this project involved a Dell PowerEdge R720, with the following specifications:ĬPU: 2x Intel Xeon E5-2690 v2 (10-core 3.00GHz) However, I also knew that PCI passthrough of consumer Nvidia cards was possible in ESXi with some tweaks to a virtual machine's configuration file (its. I knew that Dell PowerEdge R720s are designed with high-end graphics cards in mind, specifically the Nvidia Grid cards, with an emphasis on VDI environments. So, I've had an idea floating around in my head for a while, and I spent this weekend setting it up and testing it out.

Dell r720 server vdi