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June 21, 2025Microsoft Discovery: The path to an agentic EDA environment
June 21, 2025
Workflow
- NX users access the NX application deployed on Azure Virtual Desktop via Remote Desktop Application (RDP). User can access the NX application either login into the Session Desktop or via remote application(streaming).
- Users’ identity and credential must be set in Siemens Azure subscription to access the valid NX X licenses. Use accesses are granted through their companies Microsoft Entra ID. Siemens cloud subscription is required for NXX Saas application. When a user connects to a workspace, they authenticate via Entra ID, which enables modern security controls such as Conditional Access policies, Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). This Azure AD integration means you can enforce who can access the virtual desktops under what conditions (for example, requiring MFA or compliant devices).
- Azure Virtual Desktop control plane seamlessly manages the web access, Gateway, broker & diagnostic and extensibility components such as REST APIs.
- Azure Virtual Desktop Host Pools manages the session hosts, application groups, user assignments.
- Session Hosts: Session hosts are GPU enabled Azure virtual machines. Administrator will deploy the NX on session hosts with the common NX product image.
- Application groups: AVD supports multiple Application groups. Application group is collection of Session desktop and NX remote application, M360 application or any other CAD applications.
- Workspace: All these application groups should be grouped under a workspace which will be displayed in Remote Desktop App. in, this case Session desktop & Remote NX app are appearing on RDP client.
- User Assignments: CAD user is assigned to the workspace and application groups
- NX CAD files are stored in Azure Files or in Azure NetApp files storage. User profiles are managed by FsLogiX which is stored in Azure storage- Fileshare/Azure Netapp file.
- See the detail instructions to setup AVD on multi session hosts.
Azure Compute Sizing for AVD VMs
- For NX deployment and certification, we have used the following NVadsA10v5-series Virtual Machines. These virtual machines are powered by NVIDIA A10 GPUs/CPUs with a base frequency of 3.2 GHz, all-cores peak frequency of 4.0 GHz. With NVadsA10v5-series Azure is introducing virtual machines with partial NVIDIA GPUs. The below two configurations are used for testing NX.
|
VM Size Name |
vCPUs (Qty.) |
Memory (GB) |
GPU Accelerator |
|
Standard_NV12ads_A10_v5 |
12 |
110 |
1/3 |
|
Standard_NV18ads_A10_v5 |
18 |
220 |
1/2 |
- Deployment OS & image
- Windows 11 Enterprise multi-session
Remote Desktop Client & Connection:
- Users subscribe their ID in the Remote Desktop Application. Upon subscribing, users can see the Session Desktop and NX application.
- Users can access Session Desktop with their credentials and separate Desktop session will be opened from where they can access NX. Users can create Part, drawing and save it in the corresponding session desktop, which will save in the corresponding VMs where the user was logged in
- Users can access NX Remote app from Remote Desktop application after entering their credentials. NX application will be open locally, users can create part and drawing and save it to the corresponding VM from the where the NX is launched
Testing & Workloads:
NX/NX testing was performed using CAD industry standard NXCP- NX certification pack & ATS test suits provided by Siemens. Testing method was chosen as auto, interactive & manual mode.
To test the Performance of NX on an Azure Virtual Desktop Host with multiple users, we have followed the below methodology.
- Considering the NX hardware requirements and the Virtual Machine SKU capacity with dedicated 5 users per AVD Session host.
- Breadth-first load balancing assigns new user sessions to the session host that has the least number of connections, which helps create an even distribution. Depth-first load balancing fills up one session host before moving on to the next, which can provide efficiency during low-usage periods. For more information, see Configure host pool load balancing in Azure Virtual Desktop.
- We have selected Breadth & Depth-first both the options for the horizontal & vertical assignments of session hosts for the user load distribution.
- To check the performance of NX on AVD host with multiple users, we have tested the ATS tests (non-interactive tests) with multiple users at a time.
- Test Scenarios: NXCP/ATS & Manual listed here
GPU utilization
Conclusion:
All the listed tests have been passed successfully in Azure virtual desktop multi session set up. The result is that the NV_A10_v5 through AVD is now certified for multi-session use by the Siemens NX team.
You can view the of NX on AVD here.