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PowerCLI automation for VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA (PAIF-N)

04.02.2024 by William Lam // 2 Comments

With the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.1.1, customers can now take advantage of the new VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA (PAIF-N) solution, providing an optimized and validated platform by NVIDIA for running modern AL/ML workloads on VCF. To learn more about the PAIF-N solution for VCF, there is a comprehensive PAIF-N Guide that includes the full software build-of-materials (BOM) as well as a step-by-step implementation guide for deploying the solution.

If you are interested in exploring the new PAIF-N solution, I recently came to learn the PowerCLI team have created some really useful PowerCLI scripts which fully automates the deployment of PAIF-N and makes setting up the environment a breeze!

There are 4 PowerCLI scripts that is included in the PAIF-N automation:

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, PowerCLI, Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA, VMware Cloud Foundation Tags // NVIDA, PAIF-N, PowerCLI, VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation

NVIDIA GPU with Dynamic DirectPath IO (Passthrough) to Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Cluster using vSphere with Tanzu

10.17.2023 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

When provisioning a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Cluster (TKC) using vSphere with Tanzu, you can easily request an NVIDIA GPU resource as part of the deployment, which can either be provided by NVIDIA vGPU or using PCIe passthrough with Dynamic DirectPath IO.

vGPU is great for those with a capable NVIDIA GPU, especially if the GPU will not be utilized 100% and you can share its resources amongst several VMs. However, if you do not have a capable GPU that supports vGPU, you can still provide you TKC workloads with a GPU resource using passthrough.


While playing with the Lenovo P3 Ultra, I unfortunately came to learn that NVIDIA RTX A5500 Laptop was NOT the same as an NVIDIA RTX A5500 🙁

Not ideal, but I guess NVIDIA did not want to add this additional device to their test matrix and hence their ESXi graphics drivers would not detect the GPU as vGPU capable. I knew that I could still use the NVIDIA GPU via passthrough but to my surprise, I just needed to get the NVIDIA drivers installed onto the TKC worker nodes.

That was much easier said than done as all the documentation that I could find on both VMware and NVIDIA website had detailed instructions for vGPU configuration but there was little to no documentation on how to use NVIDIA GPU in passthrough mode with vSphere with Tanzu. I came across a number of different NVIDIA solutions when it comes to k8s, but it was not very clear on which would be interoperable with vSphere with Tanzu and I eventually figured it out with the help pointing me in the right direction.

It was actually super easy, once you knew the exact steps! 😅

[Read more...]

Categories // Kubernetes, VMware Tanzu, vSphere 7.0, vSphere 8.0 Tags // GPU, NVIDA, Passthrough, vSphere Kubernetes Service

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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