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NIM on this catalog: what is covered, and what is not

An engineer deploying NVIDIA NIM asked this catalog reasonable questions and found the answers scattered or missing. This page puts them in one place, and it is honest about the absences. View source markdown.

What is retained

The NIM on KServe entry retains the KServe subtree of NVIDIA/nim-deploy at an exact commit: the serving runtimes and the model-by-GPU shapes, with a digest index over every file. The deployment scaffolding is Apache-2.0; the license read verified that against the actual terms before anything was built.

One shape you can read, instead of a count

examples/aicr/kserve-nim-inference/upstream/kserve/nim-models/llama-3.1-8b-instruct_1xgpu_1.1.0.yaml is a complete InferenceService: one nvidia.com/gpu, the named runtime nvidia-nim-llama-3.1-8b-instruct-1.1.0, and model storage on pvc://nvidia-nim-pvc/. Every other shape in the directory has the same anatomy at different sizes, up to llama3-70b-instruct_4xh100.

The licensing boundary

The runtime images and models behind these shapes are NGC-gated under NVIDIA AI Enterprise licensing. The catalog retains the configuration shapes and never redistributes the gated artifacts. NGC API keys enter a deployment only as target facts you supply; a literal credential value anywhere in the retained tree stops the compile.

What is not covered, plainly

  • Triton, vLLM, and Ray Serve are not retained here. Searching this catalog for them finds nothing, and that is the true answer today.
  • GPU node provisioning (device plugins, node selectors, taints) is covered for the charts that carry it - see karpenter and nvidia-device-plugin in the catalog - not as a general guide.
  • No GPU workload has run to produce any receipt in this catalog. Every NIM claim here is config-plane: import, render, digest pinning, delivery wiring.

If one of the absences blocks you, say so with a problem chart report: demand is what orders the queue.

Generated from the committed markdown file docs/user/nim-coverage.md. The source file is the authoritative version.