Today we are happy to announce the public preview of Windows on AKS GPU support! This feature aims to provide customers with the options of GPU compute-intensive workloads. A few examples of where a GPU supported node would benefit workloads are video encoding, machine learning, and large simulations. Through this release we hope to increase the parity between Windows and Linux on AKS.  

What is it? 

GPU support has been accomplished by enabling Windows node pools in AKS to support GPU workloads. This release will support all AKS Windows SKUs releases. As for the GPU support, there will be NVIDIA’s CUDA and GRID drivers. The current architecture installs a specific GPU Driver for each VM size. 

Prerequisites/High level Call outs for Enabling GPU Support 

Workload and driver compatibility are essential to deploying Windows nodes with GPU support. Please verify the workload is compatible with the driver installed to the VM Size.  

VM Size 

Driver Type 

NC series 

CUDA 

NV, ND 

GRID 

Required For Setup 

Kubernetes version 1.29.0 or greater is required for set up. 
Updating an existing Windows node pool to GPU isn’t supported. 
For AKS node pools, we recommend a minimum size of Standard_NC6s_v3.
The NVv4 series (based on AMD GPUs) aren’t supported on AKS.

Optional Opt Out of Configuration 

Customer can opt out of auto driver installation by using:     

      –skip-gpu-driver-install flag 

In Closing 

To get started you can follow a detailed guide to show step-by-step instructions here. 

We would love to hear your feedback and suggestions on this new feature. Thank you for using Windows on AKS. We hope you enjoy using GPU supported nodes.  

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