To run vSphere Bitfusion successfully, you must satisfy the system and networking requirements for your servers and clients.

Cluster requirements for vSphere Bitfusion

A vSphere Bitfusion cluster must consist of one, three, or more vSphere Bitfusion servers. A cluster with two servers can lose quorum majority when one of the servers is inoperable. If your cluster consists of only two servers with GPUs, you can add a third vSphere Bitfusion server without GPUs to act as a witness server.

Web browser requirements for vCenter Server

To use vSphere Bitfusion, you require a web browser version that is supported by vCenter Server. For more information, see vSphere Client Software Requirements in the vCenter Server Installation and Setup documentation.

vSphere Bitfusion compatibility, interoperability, and life cycle

For a list of versions, models, and products that are compatible with vSphere Bitfusion, see the VMware Interoperability Matrix page. To check the compatibility between a vSphere Bitfusion server and client, you can use the Interoperability tab, select VMware vSphere Bitfusion from the drop-down menu under Select Solutions, and select the vSphere Bitfusion client from the drop-down menu under Add Platform/Solution.

To check the interoperability between vSphere Bitfusion and 3rd party solutions, such as operating systems, libraries, hardware accelerators, and so on, you can use the 3rd Party Solution Interoperability tab, select VMware vSphere Bitfusion from the drop-down menu under Select Solutions, and select All Categories from the drop-down menu under Select 3rd Party Solutions.

For a list of supported vSphere Bitfusion versions and their life cycle, see the VMware Product Lifecycle Matrix.

Required ports for vSphere Bitfusion

Verify that the following ports are not blocked by a denylist or firewall rules between the vSphere Bitfusion servers and clients. You need to open the ports, for example, if a firewall tool is set up on the client or if the client is installed outside of the vCenter Server instance, where the vSphere Bitfusion servers run, and there is an external firewall between the client and the vCenter Server instance.

Note: Do not modify the firewall rules of your ESXi host.

Since vSphere Bitfusion 3.5, due to security concerns, the TLSv1.0 and TLSv1.1 protocols are deactivated by default. For more information, see Knowledge Base article 2145796.

Port Description
443 This port is used for the communication between vSphere Bitfusion and the vSphere Client.
7000 and 7001 These ports are used by Apache Cassandra for communication between vSphere Bitfusion servers.
9042 This port is used by Apache Cassandra to communicate with the native protocol clients.
9142 This port is used by Apache Cassandra for the Cassandra Thrift API.
9160 This port is used by Apache Cassandra. The CQL native transport listens for vSphere Bitfusion clients on this port and the port is used when encrypted and unencrypted connections are required.
45201 - 46225 These ports are used by vSphere Bitfusion clients to communicate with the vSphere Bitfusion server processes that handle CUDA requests.
55001 - 55201 These ports are used by vSphere Bitfusion clients to communicate with a task specific dispatcher process that runs on the vSphere Bitfusion server. The process requests a session and starts the service workers of the vSphere Bitfusion server that handle the workload.
56001 This port is used for vSphere Bitfusion intercommunication. vSphere Bitfusion servers communicate with each other on this port and vSphere Bitfusion clients use this port to start a task on a vSphere Bitfusion server.
161 This port is used for SNMP requests when using monitoring plug-ins on a vSphere Bitfusion server.
162 This port is used for SNMP results when using monitoring plug-ins on a vSphere Bitfusion server.
18515 This port is used by network performance testing tools, such as PerfTest, when verifying the speed of network connections between a vSphere Bitfusion server and client.

System requirements for vSphere Bitfusion server

vSphere Bitfusion requires an ESXi host on which to install the vSphere Bitfusion server.

The vSphere Bitfusion server must run on a vSphere deployment with the following system requirements.

  • The minimum disk space requirement for a vSphere Bitfusion 4.5.1 and earlier server appliance is 50 GB.
  • The minimum disk space requirement for a vSphere Bitfusion 4.5.2 and later server appliance is 75 GB.
  • The ESXi host, on which a vSphere Bitfusion server with version 4.5.2 and earlier runs, must be of version 7.0 or later.
  • The minimum memory requirement for a vSphere Bitfusion server is 32 GB or 150% of the total GPU memory that is installed on the server, whichever is higher.
  • The minimum virtual CPU (vCPU) requirement for a vSphere Bitfusion server is the number of GPU cards multiplied by 4.
  • The network supports TCP/IP or RoCE (PVRDMA adapters), or both.
  • A minimum of 10 Gbps of bandwidth for every two GPUs on a vSphere Bitfusion server.
  • The latency between a client machine and a server virtual machine must be 50 microseconds or less. This is not a strict requirement, but the performance of the vSphere Bitfusion deployment is better with low latency.
  • All vSphere Bitfusion servers must be connected to the same set of valid NTP servers.

System requirements for vSphere Bitfusion client

vSphere Bitfusion requires a virtual machine, a bare metal machine, or a container on which to install the vSphere Bitfusion client.

  • Тhe minimum disk space requirement for a vSphere Bitfusion client is 2 GB.
  • The minimum memory requirement for a vSphere Bitfusion client is at least 150% of the GPU memory that applications request to use.
  • The minimum virtual CPU (vCPU) requirement for a vSphere Bitfusion client is the same as the requirement for running applications with dedicated, local GPUs.
  • The vSphere Bitfusion client must be installed on a machine that uses one of the following operating systems.
    • CentOS 7
    • Red Hat Linux 7.9
    • Red Hat Linux 8.5
    • Red Hat Linux 9.0
    • Ubuntu Linux 18.04
    • Ubuntu Linux 20.04
    • Ubuntu Linux 22.04
    • SUSE Linux 15.3
    • Rocky Linux 8
    • Rocky Linux 9

Prerequisites for VMs of vSphere Bitfusion clients

If the vSphere Bitfusion client runs on a virtual machine (VM), all VMware Tools Scripts must be enabled. When creating a new virtual machine, the scripts are enabled in the default configuration.

If the vSphere Bitfusion client runs on a VM that is part of the same vCenter Server instance as the vSphere Bitfusion servers, additional system requirements apply.
  • vSphere Bitfusion client VM must run on a vSphere deployment managed by vCenter Server 7.0.
  • The ESXi host, on which a vSphere Bitfusion client VM runs, must be of version 6.7 or later.