Overview and Prerequisites for NMC Components#

Overview#

Air-gapped installation is supported in NVIDIA Mission Control for Kubernetes deployments. You can download all NVIDIA Mission Control software once from the internet and then perform all subsequent software operations without the cluster leaving your data center.

Air-gapped deployment is the recommended approach for most NVIDIA Mission Control deployments. Assume your site is air-gapped unless you have confirmed outbound internet access to NGC and all required package repositories. The connected installation path remains available for environments where internet access is confirmed.

The NVIDIA Mission Control air-gap solution provides:

  • Download and bundle tools — The nmc-airgap CLI reads a manifest and downloads Helm charts, container images, and files into a portable bundle on an internet-connected machine. The helper scripts do the same for the individual NVIDIA Mission Control components they belong to.

  • 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 NVIDIA Mission Control components in an air-gapped environment.

Prerequisites#

Before you start, ensure the following:

Note

Before installation, download all firmware components validated for this release, as listed in the SBOM.

  • 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 NVIDIA Mission Control components depend on are accessible from the air-gapped environment. For example, if you are installing NVIDIA Mission Control Launchpad, ensure that the Keycloak service is accessible from the air-gapped environment.

  • NGC API key — Access to the NVIDIA Mission Control catalog. See how to generate an NGC API key. Configure the NGC CLI with ngc config set, including a default org. The download commands on this page fail without it.

  • 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). NVIDIA Mission Control does not deploy a registry for you. A Helm OCI registry and local repository for OS packages is recommended, but not required.

  • Registry mirroring — You must configure the container runtime (containerd, CRI-O, or RKE2) on every cluster node to use your private registry as a mirror for nvcr.io and any other upstream registries. Without it, image pulls fail and component installations stall. Refer to Configuring Registry Mirroring.

  • nmc-airgap CLI (2.3.3) — The command-line tool that reads the manifest and downloads the artifacts it lists into a bundle.

  • NVIDIA Mission Control manifest (2.5.x) — A YAML file that defines the repositories and per-component artifacts nmc-airgap downloads. The manifest is published as one resource per DGX system. Download the resource that matches the system you are installing.

Note

The NGC catalog file browser can save downloads as file, with no extension. The file contents are correct, but the published file name is not preserved. Rename the downloaded file before extracting it: nmc-airgap.tar.gz for the nmc-airgap binary and nmc-airgap-manifest-<dgx-system>.tar.gz for the manifest. The NGC CLI preserves the published file name automatically; use it for scripted downloads. The paths shown are for NGC CLI 4.x. Version 3.x nests the file one directory deeper, and the command output reports the actual local_path.