Overview and prerequisites#

Overview#

Starting in release 2.3, air-gapped installation is supported in NVIDIA Mission Control (NMC) for Kubernetes deployments. You can download all NMC software once from the internet and then perform all subsequent software operations without the cluster leaving your data center.

Air-gapped deployment is optional. It is not required to install NMC in an environment with internet access.

The NMC 2.3 air-gap solution provides:

  • Download and bundle tools — The nmc-airgap CLI and helper scripts to download and bundle artifacts (Helm charts, container images, and files) on an internet-connected machine.

  • System configuration guidance — Suggestions for system changes to enable use of local registries and repositories for downloaded artifacts (for example, container runtime registry mirroring).

  • Documentation — This guide describes how to run the tools, post-download steps, and how to deploy NMC components in an air-gapped environment.

Prerequisites#

Before you start, ensure the following:

  • Internet-connected machine — A system with network access to NGC, public Helm repositories, and any HTTP-based artifact sources. You run nmc-airgap fetch and use helper scripts on this machine.

  • Services dependency — Ensure that the services that NMC components depends on are accessible from the air-gapped environment. For example, if you are installing NMC Launchpad, ensure that the Keycloak service accessible from the air-gapped environment.

  • NGC API key — Access to the NVIDIA Mission Control catalog. See how to generate an NGC API key.

  • NGC Collection — Access to the NVIDIA Mission Control collection. See how to access the NGC collection.

  • NVIDIA Licensing Portal — Access to the NVIDIA Licensing Portal.

  • NVIDIA PID — Access to the NVIDIA Product Information Database.

  • Air-gapped environment — A private container registry already deployed and configured in the disconnected environment (for example, via BCM container registry setup or Harbor). NMC does not deploy a registry for you. A Helm OCI registry and local repository for OS packages is recommended, but not required.

  • Registry mirroring capability — You can configure the container runtime (containerd, CRI-O, or RKE2) on cluster nodes to use your private registry as a mirror for nvcr.io and any other upstream registries.

  • NMC Manifest — A YAML manifest file that defines repositories (Helm, container registries, and file sources) and per-component artifacts. Credentials are supplied via environment variables referenced in the manifest (for example, ${NGC_NVIDIA_NV_MISSION_CONTROL_API_KEY}); the manifest itself does not store secrets.

Pre-Installation Steps#

This section provides the pre-installation steps required for components that have Base view installation support. The following components are supported in the Base view installation:

  • NVIDIA Autonomous Hardware Recovery (AHR)

  • NVIDIA Autonomous Job Recovery (AJR)

Use the following command on the headnode to install the dependency for AHR and AJR installation via Base view:

apt install -y cm-config-apt-nmc