Category: Tech Notes
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NVLink and NVSwitch: How NVIDIA Builds the Scale-Up Fabric (NVIDIA AI Series, Part 7)
Fifth-generation NVLink delivers 1.8 TB/s per GPU, and NVSwitch builds a non-blocking 130 TB/s all-to-all fabric across 72 GPUs in the GB200 NVL72. Here is how the domain forms, why it determines your tensor and expert parallelism strategy, and where the boundary falls.
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GPU Partitioning on NVIDIA Data-Center GPUs: MIG vs vGPU vs Time-Slicing vs Passthrough (NVIDIA AI Series, Part 6)
Four ways to partition an NVIDIA H100, H200, or B200 GPU: MIG, vGPU, CUDA time-slicing, and full passthrough. This post covers the isolation guarantees, profile geometry, Kubernetes GPU Operator configuration, and a sizing worked example to help you pick the right mode for your cluster.
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NVIDIA AI Factory Systems: DGX, HGX, MGX and NVL72 (NVIDIA AI Series, Part 5)
DGX, HGX and MGX are not performance tiers, they are three ways to integrate the same NVIDIA GPUs. Here is how they differ and where the GB200 and GB300 NVL72 rack actually earns its 120 kW.
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VMware Cloud Foundation 9 Lab Workbook: A Beginner’s End-to-End Hands-On Task List
An instructor-style VCF 9 lab workbook for beginners: a lab-pod map, the phase-by-phase journey, a snapshot and rollback strategy, and grouped task tables from prep and bring-up through workload domains, NSX, storage, certificates, operations, upgrade, backup and teardown – with success-validation checks and a competency sign-off rubric.
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GPU Memory and Precision: HBM3e, HBM4 and What Actually Fits (NVIDIA AI Series, Part 4)
A 70B model in FP16 needs 140 GB of weights before a single token of context. Here is the GPU memory and precision math that decides what fits, why HBM (not FLOPS) is the real ceiling, and where FP8 and NVFP4 buy you headroom.
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Generating Certificates End to End in VCF 9: From CSR to Auto-Renewal (VCF 9 Series, Part 36)
A hands-on guide for VCF administrators: how certificate management works in VCF 9, preparing your Microsoft CA, generating a CSR, signing and replacing certificates from the VCF Operations console, and enabling automatic renewal.
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NVIDIA Data-Center GPU Lineup: Hopper vs Blackwell vs Rubin (NVIDIA AI Series, Part 3)
The NVIDIA data-center GPU lineup from Hopper to Blackwell to Rubin, compared for training and inference: memory, bandwidth, FP4 and rack-scale NVL72, with a clear way to choose.
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NVIDIA AI Enterprise: What the Subscription Includes and What It Costs (NVIDIA AI Series, Part 2)
NVIDIA AI Enterprise is the supported, secured wrapper around the open-source NVIDIA stack, licensed per GPU. Part 2 covers what is in the box (NIM, NeMo, Run:ai, the operators), how it is licensed (subscription, consumption, perpetual), what it costs, and when it is worth it.
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What the NVIDIA AI Stack Actually Is, End to End (NVIDIA AI Series, Part 1)
NVIDIA AI is not one product, it is a stack roughly nine layers deep from silicon to agents. Part 1 maps the whole thing: GPUs, CUDA, the operators, TensorRT-LLM, Triton, Dynamo, NIM, NeMo, Nemotron, Blueprints and the AI Enterprise wrapper that supports it all.
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Notifications and the Consumer Experience in VCF Automation (VCF Automation 9 Series, Part 41)
Governance without notice feels like sabotage. This is how notifications work in VCF Automation 9: the outbound email scenarios, the in-UI reports and alerts, provider-controlled tenant visibility, and how to make sure the warnings actually get read.
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Content Sources and Content Sharing in VCF Automation: Feeding the Catalog (VCF Automation 9 Series, Part 40)
Authoring a template and delivering it are two different jobs. This is the content-source and content-sharing model that gets templates into the VCF Automation catalog and in front of the right projects, plus the 9.1 Project Content Library.
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Identity, SSO and Custom Roles in VCF Automation: Wiring Up the VCF Identity Broker and RBAC (VCF Automation 9 Series, Part 37)
How identity actually flows in VCF Automation 9: the VCF Identity Broker and VCF SSO for the provider plane, per-organization external IdPs for tenants, the OIDC claim-mapping that silently breaks group membership, and custom roles, rights bundles and global roles for RBAC, with a real vmware/vcfa Terraform example.
Architect’s Toolkit
PJ’s Tools
VMware Cloud Foundation
- VCF Documentation
- VCF 9 Planning & Preparation Workbook
- VCF Bill of Materials (BoM)
- VMware Compatibility Guide
- VMware Interoperability Matrix
- VMware Configuration Maximums
- VMware Ports & Protocols
- VMware Hands-on Labs
- RVTools Download
Nutanix
AI & Cloud-Native Platform
- NVIDIA Build (Model Catalog)
- NVIDIA AI Enterprise Reference Architecture
- NVIDIA NIM Performance Benchmarking
- NVIDIA NGC Catalog
- NeMo Microservices Helm Chart
- Helm Charts Repository
- Hugging Face Models
Architecture & Design
About the Author
Dr Pranay Jha
Dr. Pranay Jha is a Cloud and AI Consultant with 18+ years of experience in hybrid cloud, virtualization, and enterprise infrastructure transformation. He specializes in VMware technologies, multi-cloud strategy, and Generative AI solutions. He holds a PhD in Computer Applications with research focused on Cloud and AI, has published multiple research papers, and has been a VMware vExpert since 2016 and a VMUG Community Leader.
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