NVIDIA License System (NLS) – General Availability

On the 19th of august, NVIDIA made the new License System (NLS) generally available. The announcing email also mentioned the End-of-Life (EOL) of the current vGPU Software License Server. As of 23th of July 2023, the on-premises NVIDIA License Server is no longer supported. The EOL date of the on-premises License Server is the same as the EOL of the vGPU software release branch 11. That means that as of that date, you can only use the new NVIDIA License System. As an engineer, you need to migrate your customers and their License Server(s) to the new NLS and use the new NLS for new deployments. The requirement for using the new NLS is that the environment needs to use NVIDIA vGPU software release 13.0 or later.

With the new version of the NVIDIA license services, you can choose between two types of license services:

Cloud License Service (CLS)

NVIDIA manages the new CLS License Server, and you don’t need any on-premises components. That means that your vGPU clients connect directly to the NVIDIA Cloud to get their licenses.

The downside is that you need to rely on the NVIDIA uptime and your internet connection, and there is no redundancy at the moment. The upside is that you don’t need to manage a VM and can use these resources (time and hardware) for other needs, and you have a cost reduction.

Delegated License Service (DLS)

The DLS is a virtual appliance.  You need to download the appliance from the NVIDIA license portal, and just like the current License Server, you need to assign licenses to it. The main difference is that this VM doesn’t require a Windows license.
The new DLS Virtual appliance supports the following hypervisors:

  • Citrix Hypervisor 8.2
  • Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisors with QEMU 2.12.0 (qemu-kvm-2.12.0-64.el8.2.27782638)
  • Microsoft Windows Server with Hyper-V 2019 Datacenter Edition
  • Red Hat Virtualization 4.3
  • VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) 6.7, 7.0, and 7.0.2

Conclusion:

The new License Server has some advantages over the old vGPU License Server.

  1. You don’t need to have a Windows VM.
  2. It doesn’t need the JAVA software, which requires patching and securing.
  3. You don’t need to back-up the CLS.

Overall it saves you time and resources you could spend on other activities, and it gives you a more secure environment. For more information, look at the latest NLS documentation.