NVIDIA BlueField Management and Initial Provisioning

NVIDIA BlueField Management and Initial Provisioning Download PDF

About This Document

This document defines the NVIDIA-recommended method to manage NVIDIA® BlueField®-2 and NVIDIA® BlueField®-3 networking platforms (DPUs or SuperNICs), reviews BlueField management interfaces, protocols, and capabilities (hardware, firmware, etc.), and explains how to use them to manage the BlueField.

This document also defines the NVIDIA-recommended method for initial provisioning and deploying of BlueField, along with a detailed explanation of the required steps and commands.

Target Audience

This document describes day 1 and 2 operations, and is intended for product managers, CSOs, CTOs, and data center administrators.

Scope

The applicable use case for this documents includes 1-2 BlueField DPUs in North-West connectivity operating in DPU mode and 8 BlueField SuperNICs in East-West connectivity operating in NIC mode.

Technical Support

Customers who purchased NVIDIA products directly from NVIDIA are invited to contact us through the following methods:

Customers who purchased NVIDIA M-1 Global Support Services, please see your contract for details regarding technical support.

Customers who purchased NVIDIA products through an NVIDIA-approved reseller should first seek assistance through their reseller.

Document Conventions

This document uses angled brackets notation ('<>') to indicate variable parameters that depend on the user's specific setup or configuration which should be replaced accordingly.

The following are variables which make frequent appearances in this document:

Variable

Description

<BF-BMC-IP>

IP of the BlueField's BMC

<username>

Specific username

<password>

Relevant password (whether of a specific user or otherwise)

<SystemID>

Used in Redfish requests, to obtain the value of this variable in your specific setup, run the following command:

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curl -vk -X GET -u root:<password> https://<BF-BMC-IP>/redfish/v1/Systems

Output example:

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* ALPN, offering h2 * ALPN, offering http/1.1 * TLSv1.0 (OUT), TLS header, Certificate Status (22): ... { "@odata.id": "/redfish/v1/Systems", "@odata.type": "#ComputerSystemCollection.ComputerSystemCollection", "Members": [ { "@odata.id": "/redfish/v1/Systems/Bluefield" } ], "Members@odata.count": 1, "Name": "Computer System Collection"

Info

SystemID is provided under Members: "@odata.id": "/redfish/v1/Systems/Bluefield".


Glossary

Term

Description

BFB

BlueField bootstream

BMC

Board management controller

BSP

BlueField support package

DOCA

BlueField SDK

eMMC

Embedded multi-media card

eROT

Extended enhanced root of trust

  • CEC for BlueField-2

  • Glacier for BlueField-3

FW

Firmware

Host

When referring to "the host" this documentation is referring to the server host. When referring to the Arm based host, the documentation will specifically call out "Arm host".

  • Server host OS refers to the host server OS (Linux or Windows)

  • Arm host refers to the aarch64 Linux OS which is running on the BlueField Arm cores

HW

Hardware

NIC

Network interface card

OOB

Out-of-band

OS

Operating system

PCIe

PCI Express; Peripheral Component Interconnect Express

PF

Physical function

RMC

Remote management controller

UEFI

Unified extensible firmware interface

VF

Virtual function

VM

Virtual machine

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