VMware and Nvidia have expanded their alliance to make it easier for enterprises to run GPU-accelerated AI applications in existing data centre infrastructure.
The virtualisation giant announced the expanded alliance with Nvidia Tuesday, saying that the GPU maker has exclusively certified VMware’s vSphere 7 Update 2 to support the new Nvidia AI Enterprise offering, a software suite of enterprise-grade AI tools and frameworks that enables Nvidia GPU-accelerated applications to run in virtual machines and containers.
VMware’s vSphere 7 Update 2 is also introducing support for Nvidia’s A100 Tensor Core GPU and its multi-instance GPU feature, which will allow data centre operators to split up individual A100s into as many as seven distinct instances for use by multiple users.
Nvidia said it developed Nvidia AI Enterprise alongside VMware as part of a first-of-its-kind industry collaboration that will allow enterprises to move AI applications from bare-metal servers to virtualized environments with very little performance impact. The suite includes solutions that support a broad range of industries, from health care and manufacturing to financial services.
Justin Boitano, vice president and general manager of Enterprise and Edge Computing at Nvidia, told CRN USA that the vSphere exclusivity agreement means that the Nvidia AI Enterprise offering is not available on any other virtualization platform. He declined to say when the exclusivity agreement…
