Does paraview run on Windows Server 2019

I installed Paraview on an Azure virtual machine which runs Server 2019 OS. It installs without problems, however it doesn’t run. It starts with an empty (non responding message window) and crashes.
Tried compatibility mode (windows 8) that also doesn’t help

What binary did you grab?

@utkarsh.ayachit

I suspect it’s an OpenGL issue. Any details on how to reproduce the issue? What SKU and which VM image are you using specifically?

I got paraview 5.11 running on a Standard NC4as T4 v3 and GRID 13.1 (472.39) NVIDIA drivers.
NC6 machines with datacenter nvidia driver won’t play.
I would like to have a list of Azure machine types (and nvidia drivers) which work with Paraview, It’s now a trial and error game.

You need NVidia GRID to use GPUs for graphics applications. As mentioned here, the “GRID drivers redistributed by Azure don’t work on non-NV series VMs like NCv2, NCv3, ND, and NDv2-series VMs. The one exception is the NCas_T4_V3 VM series where the GRID drivers enable the graphics functionalities similar to NV-series.”

ref:


FYI, to determine if any failure is indeed a driver issue when starting ParaView, here is what I do:

  • run paraview from CMD with command paraview.exe -l d:/paraview.log,TRACE. You can change the filename for the log file to any of your choice.
  • once ParaView exits, you can look at the generated log file to see what’s going on. In case of OpenGL driver issues, you’ll see something like the following message near the end of the log file
...
(   3.288s) [paraview        ]vtkWin32OpenGLRenderWin:680    ERR| vtkWin32OpenGLRenderWindow (0000018FD8AC1C00): failed to get wglChoosePixelFormatARB
(   3.329s) [paraview        ]vtkWin32OpenGLRenderWin:758    ERR| vtkWin32OpenGLRenderWindow (0000018FD8AC1C00): failed to get valid pixel format.
(   3.331s) [paraview        ]vtkOpenGLRenderWindow.c:475    ERR| vtkWin32OpenGLRenderWindow (0000018FD8AC1C00): GLEW could not be initialized: Missing GL version

This is generally easier on Linux since the output is printed on the terminal itself and hence easy to inspect. For Windows, I’ve found that saving the output to a log file as done here makes life much easier.

Thanks for the tips and links!