Scope
This Reference Deployment Guide (RDG) provides detailed instructions for deploying a Kubernetes (K8s) cluster using the DOCA Platform Framework (DPF). The guide covers setting up accelerated OVN-Kubernetes, Host-Based Networking (HBN) services, and additional services on NVIDIA® BlueField®-3 DPUs.
As a reference implementation, this guide focuses on using open-source components and outlines the entire deployment process, including bare metal and virtual machine provisioning with KVM virtualization and MaaS. It also addresses performance tuning to achieve optimal results.
Leveraging NVIDIA's DPF, administrators can provision and manage DPU resources within a Kubernetes cluster while deploying and orchestrating HBN and accelerated OVN-Kubernetes services. This approach enables full utilization of NVIDIA DPU hardware acceleration and offloading capabilities, maximizing data center workload efficiency and performance.
This guide is designed for experienced system administrators, system engineers, and solution architects who seek to deploy high-performance Kubernetes clusters and enable NVIDIA BlueField DPUs.
This reference implementation, as the name implies, is a specific, opinionated deployment example designed to address the use case described above.
While other approaches may exist to implement similar solutions, this document provides a detailed guide for this particular method.