VMware teams up with Nvidia on AI Enterprise software suite

Optimized, certified, and supported to run on vSphere

Nick Booth, Reporter

March 9, 2021

2 Min Read

Optimized, certified, and supported to run on vSphere

A joint project between Nvidia and VMware now enables IT professionals to support AI with the same tools they use to manage data centers and hybrid cloud environments.

The AI Enterprise suite expands AI management capabilities of VMware’s ever-popular vSphere virtualization platform – as long as the underlying hardware comes from Nvidia.

“Until now, the world has run AI on bare-metal servers,” said Justin Boitano, vice president and general manager of Enterprise and Edge Computing at Nvidia. “Nvidia AI Enterprise enables customers to reduce AI model development time from 80 weeks to just eight weeks, and allows them to deploy and manage advanced AI applications on VMware vSphere with the same scale-out, record-breaking Nvidia accelerated computing performance that’s possible on bare metal.”

The next step in GPU virtualization

The challenge was to temper Nvidia’s enterprise-grade suite of artificial intelligence tools and frameworks and make these powerful systems less intimidating, and more accessible to a wider range of professionals who need to use AI.

The AI Enterprise suite has been optimized, certified and supported by Nvidia to run with the latest vSphere 7 Update 2 release, available immediately. It includes a variety of tools and frameworks used to develop AI applications, including TensorFlow and PyTorch, Nvidia Transfer Learning Toolkit, Nvidia Triton Inference Server, and Nvidia TensorRT.

Perhaps more importantly, it includes several tools used for infrastructure optimization, like the Magnum IO subsystem, Cuda-X libraries and DOCA SDK for DPU-accelerated data center services.

Some of the use cases suggested for the new software suite include advanced diagnostics in healthcare, smart factories in manufacturing, and fraud detection in financial services.

The latest version of vSphere is now certified for Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs that appear in high-volume servers from Dell Technologies, HPE, Lenovo and Supermicro.

In addition, Nvidia ConnectX-6 adapters are now certified for VMware vSAN over RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access).

About the Author

Nick Booth

Reporter

Nicholas Booth is the editor of OhThisBloodyComputer and a freelance technology writer contributing to to several British and international publications.

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