This is a guest blog post by Charlie Huang, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, GPU Virtualization, NVIDIA.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, much of the world has shifted to remote work. Employees at organizations across all industries, as well as students from K-12 to universities, are working from home.

This was intended to be a temporary solution during the pandemic, but many companies are now signaling a delayed return to the office until at least the middle of 2021. Some organizations like Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft have even announced that after the pandemic, they would continue allowing employees to work remotely.

With the shift to a remote work environment, the demand for graphics-accelerated virtual apps and desktops infrastructure for everyday programs like Windows 10, Office 365, YouTube, and video conferencing is greater than ever before. Citrix Hypervisor and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops with NVIDIA GRID vApps and GRID vPC software, powered by NVIDIA datacenter GPUs, help IT deliver virtualized environments with a native PC-like experience that optimizes productivity and collaboration.

Advanced workflows — like the ones engineers, technical professionals, and creatives use with interactive design processes, rendering photorealistic images, and real-time simulations — require high-powered workstations that are typically located at desks in the office. But now, remote workers may face challenges accessing their physical workstations.

NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstation (Quadro vDWS) software with Citrix Virtual Desktop and Citrix HDX technology enables the ability to access high performance virtual workstations delivered from the datacenter, with the same user experience they would achieve from a physical workstation. This joint NVIDIA and Citrix solution empowers employees to do their best work from any device, from anywhere.

Not only do the users benefit from an enhanced experience, but IT gets advantages as well with all the management, monitoring and operational benefits that hypervisor-based virtualization, like with Citrix Hypervisor, brings to the data center. Features such as live migration on Citrix Hypervisor enables system administrators to move a running VM from one host to another without any VM downtime. With close partnership between NVIDIA and Citrix, NVIDIA vGPUs are enabled with these capabilities integrated into the Citrix Hypervisor, so that GPU-accelerated VMs have all the operational benefits, including live migration.

To learn more about NVIDIA virtual GPU technology, please check out these resources: