Deploy Distributed LLM Inference with GPUDirect RDMA over InfiniBand in VMware Private AI

Key Highlights and Technical Deep Dives Leveraging HGX Servers for Maximum Performance Intra-Node and Inter-Node Communication GPUDirect RDMA in VCF Determining Server Requirements Architecture Overview Deployment Workflow and Best Practices Practical Examples and Configurations Performance Verification Related Related Articles Deploy Distributed LLM Inference with GPUDirect RDMA over InfiniBand in VMware Private AI VMware Cloud Foundation Support Upgrade Playbook VCF Breakroom Chats Episode 58: A Smarter Way to a Unified Private Cloud Consumption Experience with VCF 9.0 At the VMware Explore 2025 keynote, Chris Wolf announced DirectPath enablement for GPUs with VMware Private AI , marking a major step forward in simplifying and scaling enterprise AI infrastructure. By granting VMs exclusive, high-performance access to NVIDIA GPUs, DirectPath allows organizations to fully harness GPU capabilities without added licensing complexity. This makes it easier to experiment, prototype, and move AI projects into production with confidence. Besides, VMware Private AI brings models closer to enterprise data, delivering secure, efficient, and cost-effective deployments. Jointly engineered by Broadcom and NVIDIA, the solution empowers organizations to accelerate innovation while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO). These advancements come at a critical time. Serving state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) like DeepSeek-R1 , Meta Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct , and Qwen3-235B-A22B-thinking at full context length often exceeds the capacity of a single 8x H100 GPU server, making distributed inference essential. Aggregating resources from multiple GPU-enabled nodes allows these models to run efficiently, though it introduces new challenges in infrastructure management, interconnect optimization, and workload scheduling. This is where VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) plays a vital role. VCF is the industry’s first private cloud platform to deliver public cloud scale and agility while providing on-premises security, resilience, and performance—all with lower TCO. Leveraging technologies such as NVIDIA NVLink , NVSwitch , and GPUDirect® RDMA , VCF enables high-bandwidth, low-latency communication across nodes. It also ensures that network interconnects like InfiniBand (IB) and RoCEv2 (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) are used effectively, reducing communication overhead that can limit distributed inference performance.