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Certification

NVIDIA-Certified Hypervisors: Validating Single-Node Performance on NVIDIA GB200

Part 2 of our three-part series on NVIDIA-Certified Hypervisors

In Part 1, we introduced the NVIDIA-Certified Hypervisors program and the certification tracks NVIDIA provides for Arm and x86 platforms. In this second post, we go deeper into the Arm platform certification, currently scoped to NVIDIA GB200 NVL systems. The certification validates a single 4-GPU, 2-CPU passthrough virtual machine within one GB200 NVL compute tray.

A GPU VM can boot successfully. All four GPUs can appear correctly in the guest operating system. The NVIDIA software stack can install successfully. Yet the system can still suffer from incorrect NUMA placement, degraded CPU-to-GPU bandwidth, an underperforming GPU, or other configuration issues that significantly affect application performance.

For a GPU cloud provider, the GPU is visible is not the same as "the GPU infrastructure is ready for a tenant.

In this post, we'll look at the types of tests used to validate a single NVIDIA GB200 system and what they tell us about the performance and readiness of a virtualized GPU environment.

Single Node Hypervisor Certification

NVIDIA-Certified Hypervisors: Bringing Near Bare-Metal Performance to GPU VMs

Part 1 of a three-part series on NVIDIA-Certified Hypervisors

In August 2026, Rafay announced that its Virtual Machines-as-a-Service (VMaaS) offering had achieved NVIDIA-Certified Hypervisors status for NVIDIA accelerated computing infrastructure.

This milestone comes as enterprises, AI factories, and GPU cloud providers increasingly turn to virtualization to securely deliver GPU infrastructure across customers, teams, and workloads. Virtual machines provide the isolation, multi-tenancy, governance, and operational flexibility needed to turn high-value GPU infrastructure into a scalable cloud service.

But for AI workloads, virtualization raises a critical question:

Can a GPU VM deliver performance comparable to running directly on bare metal?

The NVIDIA-Certified Hypervisors program is designed to answer that question by validating virtualization platforms for performance on NVIDIA accelerated computing infrastructure.

In this three-part series, we'll look beyond the certification itself and explore what NVIDIA validates, how the testing is performed, and what the results tell us about the performance of GPU workloads running inside virtual machines.

Hypervisor Certification