Software Certification Questions on Virtual Machines

The NVIDIA Grid VCA is certified for running SolidWorks in a virtualized environment.

Can a virtual machine be certified for CAD software? It’s not an existential philosophical question like, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” It’s a question that might sway some businesses to buy into—or opt out of—the emerging virtualization ecosystem.

Traditionally, when IT managers representing engineering and design firms go shopping, they make sure the hardware they’re purchasing—workstations from the Dell Precision family, HP Z series, or Lenovo ThinkStation lines, for example—are certified for the software the staff is planning to use. This effort ensures that the CPU-GPU-RAM configuration of the machine has been tested and approved by software vendors like Autodesk, Dassault Systemes, PTC, Siemens PLM Software, or SolidWorks. Certification is the cornerstone of vendors’ obligation to provide support, because it means they’ve endorsed a specific piece of hardware for use with your favorite CAD software.

Many of the mini-server or private-cloud appliances developed to support enterprise virtualization are put together with components certified for CAD. For example, NVIDIA’s Grid Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) is built with NVIDIA Quadro GPUs, certified to run major CAD applications. But does that mean the certification extend to the virtual machines created from that hardware?

Brian Thompson, PTC’s product manager for CAD and PLM, says, “The pull to certify PTC Creo in a virtual environment started with feedback from our Technical Committees in January of 2012. At that time, we already had a few customers using virtualization technology with some success, but they wanted our help in working with virtualization vendors and our hardware partners to put a more formal framework in place for certification of PTC Creo in this type of environment. After understanding the business benefits ... we decided to aggressively pursue this with PTC Creo 2.0. Therefore, with PTC Creo 2.0 M060—released in June of 2013—we announced that we had fully certified PTC Creo for use in virtualized environments. This was about one year after the initial customer shipment of PTC Creo 2.0—a time during which PTC Creo 2.0 adoption was happening very quickly. This certification was initially done with a particular software and hardware technology stack, but has since expanded. The details of our current virtualization support can be found at ptc.com for Dell, HP and IBM.”

Amelise Javier Lane, Autodesk’s PR manager for media and entertainment, says, “Autodesk continues to work with all of our hardware partners to ensure our solutions will perform optimally on various workstations. As virtual solutions like VMWare become more  popular, we evaluate each opportunity on a case-by-case basis and according to customer demand. Currently, Autodesk does not have a formal program to certify virtual workstations.”

The best answer I can deduce from online literature and CAD software developers’ responses to my email inquiries is this: Currently, some CAD software titles are certified to run in virtualized environment, like VMWare’s Fusion; and some CAD software are certified to run on certain hardware designed to support virtualization. But certifying virtual machines may prove too complicated, in part because of the infinite configurations possible.

Furthermore, bandwidth connection and interconnects play an important role in determining the interactive experience and the performance of the software running on a virtual machine. And neither the virtualization hardware maker nor the software developer can take responsibility for that, because it’s part of the virtualization infrastructure, supplied by the company’s in-house IT or another set of vendors.

If you’re a software or hardware vendor who can provide more info on this topic, I’d like to hear from you. Please leave your thoughts as comments or email them to me at [email protected].