With Nvidia entering into the $1 trillion club and everyone trying to get on the AI bandwagon, perhaps it’s the right time to post a write-up on their DC licensing.
While working on the delivery of an HCI (Cisco HyperFlex) solution containing Nvidia A100 80GB PCIe cards (these are beefy ones! – x16 double wide [PCIe slot width] – see below pic, with it sitting on the PCI riser), stumbled upon a customer question about vGPU support for different guest/VM OSes.
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With some assistance from the local OEM (Nvidia) partner support team and a little digging into Nvidia documents, led me to the below information and is at least tested and verified for A100 (hardware) + Nvidia AI Enterprise [NVAIE] (software license).
Nvidia provides different profiles and vGPU types for use with different OSes and platforms (bare-metal/physical and virtualized/guest/VM).
Profiles are a result of the combination of the GPU hardware and software licenses bought. Below are the different profiles and vGPU types available with them.
In my case, even though the GPU hardware (A100) is capable of supporting both the vWS and vCS profiles, we can only truly use the vCS essentially.
This is due to the above stated fact –
profiles available eventually = combination of GPU hardware model + software license.
So the vWS profile is of no use here with AI Enterprise, as only C-series vGPU types will be available and not Q- and B-series vGPU types. C-series is any which ways available with vCS profile.
| Profile/License Edition | vGPU Type | OS Supported | Use case | |
| vGPU (formerly GRID) Products | ||||
| vApps Virtual Applications | A-series | Windows,Linux | VDI – Streaming Apps, Citrix XenApp/Apps, MS RDSH, Horizon Apps | |
| vPC Virtual PC “Business” | B-series | Windows, Linux | VDI – Desktops, Citrix XenDesktop/CVAD, Horizon | |
| vCS Virtual Compute Server | C-series | Linux | AI, DL, HPC, Advanced Data Science | |
| vDWS or RTX vWS Virtual Data Center Workstation “Quadro” | Q-series C-series B-series | Windows, Linux Linux Windows, Linux | 3D Apps Advanced Data Science VDI | |
| Compute-intensive Workload Product | ||||
| AI Enterprise | C-series | Linux* | AI, DL, HPC, Advanced Data Science | |
Note 1: vCS is now only available through AI Enterprise and not through vGPU category.
Ref: Nvidia vGPU Licensing Guide, Nvidia AI Enterprise Licensing Guide
Note 2: NVAIE licenses bought prior to April 2023 with old SKU (731-AIE001+P2CMI60) covers 1 GPU and 10 VMs. Newer SKU covers 1 GPU and 20 VMs (screen grab from the above linked NVAIE licensing guide).
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*Update: After checking in with Nvidia Support, got to know that Windows OS also works with the Nvidia AI Enterprise license along with C-series vGPU types by disabling the Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) feature.
IT Findings 
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