Deployment Guide

Pre-deployment requirements
13 VMware vSphere Bitfusion on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers | Deployment guide
4 Pre-deployment requirements
This section describes the pre-deployment requirements for configuring VMware vSphere Bitfusion. Figure 13
shows an illustration of the components involved in creating the Bitfusion client-server cluster.
Bitfusion sample client-server cluster
4.1 GPU hosts
The Bitfusion OVA is deployed on the GPU hosts. Below are the Dell EMC customized images for VMware
ESXi 7.0 that support Bitfusion OVA deployed on the GPU hosts:
• Dell EMC customized image of VMware ESXi 7.0 installed on a PowerEdge R740xd server with
NVIDIA T4, NVIDIA V100, Mellanox RoCE v2 compatible network adapter.
• Dell EMC customized image of VMware ESXi 7.0 installed on a PowerEdge C4140 sxm2 chassis
server with four NVIDIA V100, Mellanox RoCE v2 compatible network adapter. The GPU chassis
configuration for the PowerEdge C4140 does not accommodate any redundant local storage. You
can create a shared Network File System (NFS) and mount it as a datastore on this host.
For information about the network cards that are supported for PVRDMA configuration, see the VMware
Compatibility Guide page. Select RoCE v1 and RoCE v2 options from the Features tab and then select the
DELL option from the Brand Name tab. For more information on how to download Dell EMC customized
ESXi images, see Dell Knowledge Base article SLN288152.
4.2 Client cluster
vSAN cluster comprises of virtual machines that use the GPU for data analytics, training models or for running
an inference. However, a vSAN cluster is not required for the client virtual machine.
PVRDMA is supported on VMware vSAN 7.0 if deployed on four vSAN ReadyNode nodes of PowerEdge
R740xd server with a compatible network adapter. With a dual port network adapter for management, vSAN
and vMotion traffic can be enabled. For information on certified and supported vSAN ReadyNode, see the
VMware Compatibility Guide.