NVIDIA vGPU Licensing

Through various recent projects, I had to work through the clutter of information regarding NVIDIA vGPU licensing.

Here is a small summary of this information.

NVIDIA vGPU Architecture

Under the control of the NVIDIA GPU Virtual Manager, running in the hypervisor, the NVIDIA Physical GPU can operate multiple virtual GPU devices (vGPUs), that can be assigned directly to the Guest VM.

Diagram showing the high-level architecture of NVIDIA vGPU

The Guest VMs use the NVIDIA virtual vGPUs in the same way as a physical GPU would come from the hypervisor by direct passed through. The NVIDIA Driver loaded into the guest VM provides Direct GPU Access for high-performance operations. The NVIDIA Virtual GPU Manager paravirtualized interface performs the non-performance management operations for the NVIDIA Driver.

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