NVIDIA Mission Control: what it is, how it is licensed and what a DGX B300 includes

What NVIDIA Mission Control is

NVIDIA Mission Control is NVIDIA's management software for AI clusters. A purchase includes Base Command Manager, Run:ai, Unified Fabric Manager and NetQ, together with additional capabilities that NVIDIA delivers only to Mission Control customers. NVIDIA's release notes for version 2.5.0, read 12 November 2026, list DGX B200 and DGX B300 clusters with a control plane of ten nodes, and for a DGX B300 bought alone NVIDIA's product page lists DGX OS as "Included" and Mission Control as "Recommended".

NVIDIA's documentation defines Mission Control as "an integrated AI factory management platform designed to simplify operations, reduce downtime, and accelerate model development for enterprise AI infrastructure" and says that it "combines NVIDIA's operational best practices and AI cluster automation into a single control plane". The product-specific terms for NVIDIA AI products, last modified on 15 April 2026, put it more plainly: Mission Control is "the NVIDIA provided software tool for management and monitoring NVIDIA GPU systems".

The documentation index describes it as "Recommended software for DGX B200/B300, Rubin NVL8, NVIDIA GB200/GB300 NVL72, and Vera Rubin NVL72 systems." Of the systems on that list we supply the DGX B300, per project. Its hardware is covered in our article on DGX B300 specs and power requirements; this article deals with the software around it.

Which systems Mission Control 2.5.0 supports

The release notes for version 2.5.0 carry a support table with one column per system and a row for the control plane.

NVIDIA Mission Control 2.5.0 Release Notes, read 12 November 2026.

The footnote to the DGX B200 and DGX B300 columns reads "HGX B200 and HGX B300 from OEMs are not supported." That line separates NVIDIA's own system from a manufacturer's server on the same eight-GPU baseboard, such as the Supermicro SYS-822GS-NB3RT. What else differs between the two is in our comparison of DGX B300, DGX B200 and HGX B300 servers.

The control-plane row gives "10 Nodes (x86 Only)" for DGX B200 and DGX B300. Mission Control is therefore software for a cluster that has management nodes of its own. The buyer of one DGX B300 does not install it on that system.

One older document reads differently. The Mission Control chapter of the Base Command Manager manual, whose text is dated February 2026, names B200, GB200 and other OEM platforms as the targets of these features. The 2.5.0 release notes are newer, list the DGX B300 and exclude HGX B200 and HGX B300 servers from OEMs, so we plan on the release notes.

What a Mission Control purchase includes

NVIDIA's documentation introduces the list with the sentence "As a part of integrated software delivery licensing, the following is included with NVIDIA Mission Control:". Four products follow: Base Command Manager for cluster management and provisioning, Run:ai for AI workload management and GPU orchestration, Unified Fabric Manager for InfiniBand networks, with the note "May require additional hardware appliances", and NetQ for observability across NVLink and Ethernet. Beyond these, the documentation says, Mission Control delivers capabilities that the four products do not contain, and they reach only customers who purchased Mission Control.

The release notes name the versions that belong to 2.5.0 and mark what applies to a DGX B300.

NVIDIA Mission Control documentation index (undated) and NVIDIA Mission Control 2.5.0 Release Notes, both read 12 November 2026.

Slurm, the observability stack and the Grafana dashboards are marked as supported on the DGX B300 as well, and NVRx 0.6.0 is installed separately. For Dynamic Power Software the notes give a failing topology activation as the reason why the DGX B300 is not supported. Minerva, a second beta component, is offered through a scoped engagement only.

The two recovery functions carry two names. The release notes file them under the "Autonomous Resiliency Engine", while NVIDIA's product page of 26 October 2026 writes "Autonomous Recovery Engine". The same page describes workload orchestration with the included Run:ai, the integration of Slurm and of a Kubernetes cluster that the operator brings, and an integration with building management that includes leak detection. Run:ai is also offered outside Mission Control: our article on Run:ai licensing and hardware requirements covers those routes, and GPU scheduling for ML teams compares its scheduler with Kueue and Slurm.

Base Command Manager and Mission Control

Base Command Manager is the cluster manager underneath. NVIDIA describes it as software for cluster provisioning, workload management and infrastructure monitoring, and documents it in versions 10 and 11. Mission Control is an edition of it: the manual describes the Mission Control features as extended features that exist only in the Mission Control edition of Base Command Manager and that can be enabled on a cluster with an active Base Command Manager licence.

NVIDIA's licensing page for Base Command Manager, last updated on 7 October 2026, lists four ways to obtain it.

NVIDIA Base Command Manager Licensing Information (last updated 7 October 2026), read 12 November 2026.

The free licence has clear terms. The page states: "For each server, node, or system within the cluster, the free license is available for up to eight accelerators." The number of servers in the cluster is not limited. The licence "is only available to organizations for their own internal purposes" and comes without NVIDIA Enterprise Support, without a service-level agreement and without support by e-mail or phone. Its term is fixed as well: "The default term for this license is one year from the date the entitlement is issued." It can be renewed every year on request, and NVIDIA adds: "The free-to-use license is subject to change."

A DGX B300 has eight GPUs, which is exactly the limit of the free licence per server. The page does not say whether the two BlueField-3 DPUs of the system count as accelerators; what such a DPU does is the subject of BlueField-3 DPU in GPU servers. Ask for that count in writing before a cluster of DGX B300 systems is planned on the free licence.

We supply Base Command Manager and Mission Control licences, both listed on our software page; send us the systems, the number of nodes and the support you need, and we reply with a written quote within one business day.

Mission Control licensing and support

NVIDIA's Software Licensing Overview and FAQ of 11 September 2026 sorts NVIDIA software into free Community Products and paid Enterprise Products. It names Mission Control next to NVIDIA AI Enterprise as an example of the paid subscriptions and states: "Enterprise Products include enterprise support." The licence files come from the NVIDIA Licensing Portal, whose entry in the Mission Control documentation reads "Generate and download license files for BCM, UFM, and NetQ."

The published detail ends there. NVIDIA publishes no price for Mission Control, no licence metric and no minimum order, and the release notes do not state the release date of version 2.5.0. How the subscription is counted for a given cluster is therefore a line that the quote has to state.

For the support itself, NVIDIA's Enterprise Support policy in its version of 12 August 2026 names three levels: Business Standard, Business Critical and Business Premium. Under Business Standard, technical support is reachable in local business hours and the initial response to a severity 1 case is due within four business hours; Business Critical shortens that response to one hour. Which level applies to a Mission Control subscription, and for which term, belongs in the quote too.

The DGX software stack on one DGX B300

For a single system, the specification table on NVIDIA's DGX B300 product page, updated on 15 October 2026, is the reference. It marks one software item as included and two as recommended.

NVIDIA DGX B300 product page (15 October 2026); NVIDIA Enterprise Licensing Guide (last updated 2 September 2026); Product-Specific Terms for NVIDIA AI Products (last modified 15 April 2026); read 12 November 2026.

The user guide lists the DGX software stack that comes pre-installed: an Ubuntu server distribution with an optimised kernel, NVSM, DCGM, the GPU driver with CUDA, Docker Engine, the NVIDIA Container Toolkit, DOCA-OFED and MST. Its operating-system row names DGX OS 7, based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, with additional support for Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and 9 and Rocky Linux. A single system therefore arrives with the driver and a container runtime in place. Base Command Manager and Mission Control are not on that list. The Mission Control 2.5.0 release notes add "support for DGX OS 8.0.0 / BaseOS 9 software images", and what changes with that release is in DGX OS 8 on the DGX B300.

For NVIDIA AI Enterprise, "Recommended" goes with a separate purchase: NVIDIA's licensing guide states that its licences have to be purchased separately for DGX systems with the Blackwell architecture, and it counts them per GPU, which makes eight licences for one DGX B300 where the software is used. DGX systems with Hopper GPUs differ: there the guide places NVIDIA AI Enterprise in the DGX software bundle. Terms, counting and what the subscription adds are explained in our guide to NVIDIA AI Enterprise licensing.

"Three-year business-standard support" is the whole support statement on the product page, and the page does not divide it into hardware and software. For DGX hardware, NVIDIA's support guide lists under Business Standard an advance replacement service with an engineer on site and next-business-day delivery included. The term describes a delivery; it promises no repair time. What manufacturers ask of the site for such visits is in on-site service for GPU servers.

Which software belongs to one system and which to a cluster

Put together, the documents give an order of steps. The table is our reading of them; NVIDIA publishes no such table.

our reading of the NVIDIA documents named in this article, read 12 November 2026; not an NVIDIA sizing.

A company that starts with one DGX B300 works with DGX OS and its container runtime. Base Command Manager becomes a question with the second and third server, and Mission Control with a DGX cluster that has control-plane nodes of its own. For HGX B300 servers from manufacturers, which we supply per project as well, the cluster management is planned without Mission Control as long as the release notes exclude them.

What to state in a DGX B300 enquiry

We supply the DGX B300 per project. Before we can quote, the distribution asks for the company, the project and the intended use. For the software lines of the quote, four more points help:

• the number of systems, and whether they run alone or as one cluster
• whether NVIDIA support for the AI software is wanted, which means NVIDIA AI Enterprise per GPU and a term
• the cluster management: none, Base Command Manager or Mission Control
• the support level beyond the three years of Business Standard support

We put the NVIDIA AI Enterprise licences on the same invoice as the system; pass these points and the site to us, or send them to request@eurokommerz.at, and we work out the configuration with its licence lines. How such an order runs from enquiry to acceptance is described in buying a DGX B300 in the EU, and the checks of rack, power and floor in our site survey for GPU servers.

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