As AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads continue to become more common and complex, system administrators and cluster managers are at the heart of keeping everything running smoothly. Their work—building, provisioning, and managing clusters—powers innovation across industries, but it’s not without its challenges.
Listening to these teams, NVIDIA has heard a clear message: Access to reliable, enterprise-grade management tools can make a real difference in day-to-day operations. Thousands of deployments globally are already leveraging NVIDIA Base Command Manager to optimize their accelerated clusters. That’s why NVIDIA Base Command Manager is now available for free, with the option to add enterprise support if and when it’s needed.
What’s changing?
- No-cost access: Organizations can now use Base Command Manager for free, supporting up to eight accelerators per system, on clusters of any size.
- New support options: Community support is available through NVIDIA Forums, while enterprise support can be purchased separately for those who need more hands-on help.
- More market choice: This move gives system administrators a trusted alternative to open source tools.
Cluster managers often face a trade-off between feature-rich, enterprise ready commercial tools and the flexibility of free open source solutions. Making Base Command Manager available at no cost aims to remove barriers and give infrastructure teams more options—whether they’re evaluating new workflows, onboarding new staff, or scaling up production clusters.
Use cases
Base Command Manager is a great cluster management tool for quickly building and managing AI and HPC clusters in production environments in the cloud, at the edge, and on-premises for containerized and non-containerized workloads with maximum performance. This free license will also enable users to use Base Command Manager for evaluation, education, and demos.
This free-to-use license is only available to organizations for their own use. It is not intended for use cases where organizations are building products or services where Base Command Manager would be resold.
Support
The default term for this license is one year, renewable annually. This free-to-use license is subject to change and doesn’t include enterprise support. However, users can either leverage NVIDIA Forums for community assistance or purchase enterprise support separately through authorized NVIDIA Enterprise Partners. This enterprise support won’t include support for NVIDIA GPU Operator, NVIDIA Network Operator, and NVIDIA vGPU.
Additionally, support for Base Command Manager along with NVIDIA GPU Operator, Network Operator, and vGPU is included with the purchase of NVIDIA AI Enterprise or NVIDIA Mission Control. NVIDIA AI Enterprise provides enterprises access to a catalog of AI and data science microservices, libraries, and toolkits.
For enterprises building AI factories, NVIDIA Mission Control powers every aspect of AI factory operations—from developer workloads to infrastructure to facilities—with advanced automation and full-stack intelligence. Mission Control builds on the existing capabilities in Base Command Manager, allowing every enterprise to run with hyperscale-grade efficiency and accelerating production AI.
How to get started
Cluster managers can learn more about NVIDIA Base Command Manager or request the free-to-use license at nvidia.com/base-command-manager.
