Update the NVIDIA driver license for vGPU instances in an ACK cluster

If your cluster contains vGPU instance nodes, you must purchase a GRID License from NVIDIA and set up your own license server to ensure these nodes function properly. This topic describes how to update the NVIDIA driver license for vGPU instances in an ACK cluster.

Prerequisites

Purchase the appropriate license. For more information, see NVIDIA License purchase.
This topic applies to dedicated, managed, and Pro editions of ACK clusters.

vGPU instances are added to the ACK cluster

After setting up the license server, update the GRID license on the node as follows.

Note

Purchase an ECS instance and follow NVIDIA's official tutorials to set up the license server. For more information, see NVIDIA.

Log on to the vGPU node and update the values of the following fields in the /etc/nvidia/gridd.conf file.
Note
For information about how to log on to a GPU node, see Connect to an instance using VNC.
```
ServerAddress=<your License Server address>
ServerPort=<License Server port>
```

Run the following commands to restart the NVIDIA driver.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart nvidia-gridd

Run the following command to confirm it executes successfully.

sudo nvidia-smi

Expected output:

Mon Apr 27 10:53:27 ****       
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 535.161.07             Driver Version: 535.161.07   CUDA Version: 12.2     |
|-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                      |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+======================+======================|
|   0  ********                       Off | 00000000:00:08.0 Off |                    0 |
| N/A   34C    P8              14W /  70W |      0MiB / 15360MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                      |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                            |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                            GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                             Usage      |
|=======================================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                           |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

The preceding output shows that the nvidia-smi command runs successfully. This means you have updated the NVIDIA driver license for the vGPU instance.