At VMworld 2020, NVIDIA and VMware shared their vision to work together to democratize and unleash AI for every enterprise. And that’s the case today as the companies roll out a jointly engineered solution that optimizes the latest update to VMware vSphere 7 — for AI applications with the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite on Dell Technologies.
The combination of technologies from these world-class companies makes it easier to access a rich menu of accelerated parallel-computing applications, AI frameworks, models and software development kits (SDKs). It gives AI researchers, data scientists and developers the software they need to deliver successful AI projects, while arming IT professionals with the ability to support AI using the tools they’re most familiar with for managing data centers and hybrid cloud environments.
Democratizing AI with VMware
VMware vSphere 7 Update 2 delivers powerful support for the latest NVIDIA A100 and new A30 GPUs, including enhancements to performance-boosting GPUDirect communications and new multi-instance GPU (MIG) partitioning. vSphere also delivers enterprise virtualization for GPU-powered AI workloads. And, vSphere is the only virtualization platform that enables vMotion for NVIDIA vGPU powered VMs, simplifying infrastructure maintenance while powering VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler for automatic initial workload placement for AI infrastructure at scale.
Boosting efficiency with NVIDIA AI Enterprise
NVIDIA AI Enterprise encompasses a suite of enterprise-grade AI applications and models that are designed to optimize business processes and boost efficiency for AI use cases across industries — from manufacturing and logistics to financial services, retail, healthcare and more. It gives users easy access to NVIDIA tools that power AI development across projects as diverse as smart factories, healthcare diagnostics and fraud detection.
And forget about AI silos. With NVIDIA AI Enterprise running on vSphere, organizations can avoid silos of AI-specific systems that create management headaches and security risks. With this combination of technologies, organizations can overcome the challenges that stem from deploying individual AI applications, as well as the potential failures that can result from having to manually provision and manage different applications and infrastructure software.
It’s Suite and Certified
Using the NVIDIA AI Enterprise suite and NVIDIA’s most advanced GPUs and data processing units (DPUs) in accelerated servers, enterprises using vSphere for server virtualization can now more easily run accelerated AI workloads alongside existing enterprise applications on Dell Technologies-NVIDIA Certified Systems, with near-bare-metal performance.
Harnessing the power of AI with Dell Technologies
At Dell Technologies, we’re excited to see the rollout of NVIDIA AI Enterprise for vSphere on Dell VxRail and PowerEdge servers with NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. That’s a point that is apparent in a comment from Caitlin Gordon, vice president, product management, Dell Technologies Infrastructure Solutions, in a VMware launch news release.
“Dell Technologies is focused on helping customers harness the power of AI by providing solutions that make it easier to adopt and use,” she notes. “Today’s news certifying NVIDIA AI Enterprise with VMware vSphere supports our efforts with both companies to provide NVIDIA A100-powered Dell systems that enable customers to benefit from AI anywhere, with continuous insights at scale, to help reach their business goals.”
It was this same spirit that led to Dell Technologies becoming the first IT company to embrace innovation that helps businesses run powerful AI workloads in VMware environments, via easy-to-deploy Dell Ready Solutions. As noted in a Dell Technologies news release, new Dell Ready Solutions based on VMware Cloud Foundation help companies gain AI insights with the combination of Dell systems and features of VMware vSphere to enable GPU virtualization.
Key takeaways
As organizations work to capitalize on the massive amounts of data they collect every day, AI is emerging as one of the most important enterprise applications — if not the most important application. It’s an essential ingredient to digital transformation and the move to the data-driven enterprise.
To enable this shift, organizations are using VMware to maintain consistent operations and governance for their multi-cloud environments, while providing automation capabilities to modernize their applications. For AI, teams previously had to use a different set of tools, however, now, AI applications can be easily managed with the same VMware flexibility as their other applications. The result: It’s easier than ever to develop, deploy and manage diverse AI workloads anywhere.
Read more about the AI Ready Enterprise Platform from VMware and explore Dell Technologies and VMware solutions. Find out ways to simplify the path to AI in a virtualized environment with NVIDIA AI Enterprise. Visit the Dell Technologies InfoHub for AI for more information.
