Disabling "Screen Blanking" for Instant Clones that have an NVIDIA vGPU passed through

[Leon]

Hi all,
I am aware of the GPO to toggle "Screen Blanking" for Horizon machines, so that you can either view/blank active sessions from the vSphere console.
At the office, we have this setting disabled as we need to be able to help troubleshoot student sessions.
We have accounted for the "VMware Horizon Indirect Display Driver" and have a working solution for our 2D Instant Clones.
Our 3D Instant Clones however, are utilizing NVIDIA A16 GPU's. It would appear that the limitations around using the "VMware Horizon Indirect Display Driver" and allowing vSphere Console access to active Instant Clone sessions also occur when using a passthrough GPU.

Is this the case? or is there anyway to allow vSphere Console access to an active Instant Clone session that is using a passthrough GPU?

Cheers,
Leon

[StephenWagner7]

10 hours ago, Leon said:

Hi all,
I am aware of the GPO to toggle "Screen Blanking" for Horizon machines, so that you can either view/blank active sessions from the vSphere console.
At the office, we have this setting disabled as we need to be able to help troubleshoot student sessions.
We have accounted for the "VMware Horizon Indirect Display Driver" and have a working solution for our 2D Instant Clones.
Our 3D Instant Clones however, are utilizing NVIDIA A16 GPU's. It would appear that the limitations around using the "VMware Horizon Indirect Display Driver" and allowing vSphere Console access to active Instant Clone sessions also occur when using a passthrough GPU.

Is this the case? or is there anyway to allow vSphere Console access to an active Instant Clone session that is using a passthrough GPU?

Cheers,
Leon

Unfortunately, when using vGPU you won't be able to view the users sessions. This is due to the way that the technology works, and not related to privacy.

[Leon]

Thanks, Stephen.

I suspect that if the "VMware SVGA" driver is not set as the primary device, vSphere is unable to display the screen content properly. I was hoping there might be a way to force the SVGA driver to be the primary device without disabling the NVIDIA A16 card.

What gave me hope is that before a user connects to the Instant Clone, vSphere can display the remote console of a machine that is configuredwith the A16 card without issue. Furthermore, once the user disconnects from their session, vSphere is again able to successfully display the remote console.

So, it seems that the vSphere remote console can function in this configuration—just not while the user is actively connected.

Is it possible this problem is affected by CODEC's that are currently in play rather than Display Devices?
We have had to do a lot of massaging around the HEVC/BLAST/Adaptive CODEC's for other random issues.