Passthrough Driver for Intel® Gaudi® AI Accelerators for VMware ESXi with Enhanced DirectPath I/O – Intel® Gaudi® 3 AI Accelerators

Products

• VMware Cloud Foundation
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Intel® Gaudi® 3 AI Accelerators are specialized hardware designed for large-scale deep learning, delivering high-performance and energy-efficient AI training and inference to end users.

This software utilizes VMware vSphere Enhanced DirectPath I/O in conjunction with VMware Device Groups to passthrough grouped Intel® Gaudi® AI Accelerators to a virtual machine (VM), enabling hardware telemetry monitoring via VMware vCenter. 

Note: This is not a standard ESXi I/O kernel driver. It is used with Enhanced DirectPath I/O to access the device.

VMware's certification of the Passthrough Driver for Intel® Gaudi® AI Accelerators verifies basic platform and device requirements for Enhanced DirectPath I/O, checking that the driver enables and groups virtual devices correctly exposing them to the VMs guest operating system.

The Enhanced DirectPath I/O certification test suite does not certify end-to-end functionality of the device. It is Intel's responsibility to support end users with end-to-end interoperability and functionality of the overall solution.

Environment

• VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0
• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0U3

Resolution

Intel® Data Center Graphics Driver and Tools for VMware ESXi are available on Intel® Download Center

To submit an Intel® Premier Support (IPS) ticket, go to Intel Support