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.
