Horizon View and Nvidia Black Screen

I encountered an issue that troubled our environment for some time. The issue presented itself as a black screen when logging into the Horizon using the VMware Client or HTML. Generally this means a firewall issue but I was able to show through packet captures that the desktops were in fact running just fine from a network perspective.

This particular issue was maddening because its the worst kind of IT issue in my opinion, intermittent. We would get reports of it happening but found it difficult to capture it in real time.

The issue ended up being that the Nvidia drivers would fail to start and when you have vGPU in your desktops that is what does the pr

As a temporary workaround we wrote a script that would look for this error on the desktops and then refresh them.

The ultimate fix was to remove the nvidia vib from the ESXi host, reboot, install the nvidia vib and then reboot. This is now the procedure for any grid installations in our environment despite VMware and Nvidia documentation.