Quick Start Guide for Kubernetes

Before You Begin

Before deploying the NVIDIA Network Operator, ensure you have the following:

Prerequisites

1. Kubernetes Cluster: A running Kubernetes cluster (v1.19+) with nodes that have NVIDIA NICs.

2. CLI Tools: Install kubectl and helm on your client machine:

   $ curl -fsSL -o get_helm.sh https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helm/helm/master/scripts/get-helm-3 \
       && chmod 700 get_helm.sh \
       && ./get_helm.sh
   

3. Container Runtime: Nodes must be configured with a container engine such as CRI-O or containerd.

Install Network Operator Helm Chart

Add the NVIDIA NGC Helm repository:

helm repo add nvidia https://helm.ngc.nvidia.com/nvidia
helm repo update

Install the Network Operator:

helm install network-operator nvidia/network-operator \
  -n nvidia-network-operator \
  --create-namespace \
  --version v25.7.0 \
  --set sriovNetworkOperator.enabled=true \
  --wait

Verify the installation:

kubectl -n nvidia-network-operator get pods

Overview of Quickstart Use Cases

This quick start guide covers five essential networking configurations for different computational requirements:

Use Case	Purpose	Performance Requirements	Applications
SR-IOV Network with RDMA	High-performance networking with hardware acceleration	>10 Gbps throughput <1μs latency Dedicated VF resources	HPC simulations, distributed ML training, financial trading Keywords: SR-IOV, RDMA, HPC, low-latency, VF isolation
Host Device Network with RDMA	Direct hardware access for legacy applications	Raw device control Exclusive hardware access Minimal CPU overhead	Legacy HPC codes, specialized protocols, DPDK applications Keywords: host-device, PCI-passthrough, direct-access, exclusive-access
IP over InfiniBand with RDMA Shared Device	InfiniBand networking with shared RDMA resources	>50 Gbps bandwidth Parallel I/O workloads Shared device efficiency	Distributed storage, data analytics, scientific computing Keywords: InfiniBand, IPoIB, shared-device, high-bandwidth
MacVLAN Network with RDMA Shared Device	Network isolation with shared RDMA capabilities	Multi-tenant segmentation 10+ pods per node Moderate throughput	Cloud-native HPC, microservices, multi-tenant ML Keywords: MacVLAN, multi-tenant, network-segmentation, resource-sharing
SR-IOV InfiniBand Network with RDMA	Virtualized InfiniBand with hardware acceleration	>100 Gbps bandwidth Hardware acceleration Isolated IB partitions	Large-scale HPC clusters, AI/ML training, research computing Keywords: SR-IOV, InfiniBand, hardware-acceleration, ultra-high-bandwidth