Prerequisites: Before creating a placement you need a provisioned reservation with free capacity, a VPC network in the reservation’s region, and at least one security group in that VPC.
Summary
This page walks you through creating and managing placements in the Nscale Console—how to carve hosts out of a reservation, how the Pack and Spread policies behave, how to manage the servers a placement launches, and how to delete a placement. Use this guide if you:- Have reserved GB300 NVL72 capacity and are ready to launch workloads onto it
- Need to control topology—keeping hosts tightly packed for performance or spread for fault isolation
- Want to run more than one cluster on the same reserved capacity
How placements work
A placement consumes capacity from its parent reservation and drives the creation of pinned servers:- Hosts. A placement allocates a number of hosts from the reservation. For GB300 NVL72, 1 host = 1 compute tray within an NVLink domain.
- Servers. The platform launches one server per allocated host. Servers are owned by the placement’s lifecycle—they’re created and removed with the placement.
- Networking. Every placement attaches to a VPC. The VPC also sets the InfiniBand partition boundary: all hosts in a placement share a single partition key, and switch-port programming is fully automated between creation and boot.
- Flavour. A placement inherits its flavour from the parent reservation—you don’t choose it again.
Placements are immutable. You can’t resize or re-policy a placement after creation. To change a placement, delete it and create a new one.
Placement policy
The placement policy decides how the platform selects hosts across the reservation’s NVLink domains.| Policy | Optimized for | Behavior |
|---|---|---|
| Pack | Low-latency, local communication | Hosts are placed as close together as possible, filling one domain before moving to the next. Best for tightly coupled training. |
| Spread | Fault isolation | Hosts are distributed evenly across the reserved domains for availability. |
Pack gives the best-possible locality, not a physics-level guarantee. Spread keeps the host-count difference between any two domains to no more than one; if an even split isn’t possible, the request fails cleanly rather than falling back to a skewed layout.
Create a placement
Creating a placement is a six-step wizard, launched from the Create Placement action on a reservation. You can’t proceed to the next step until the current one is valid.Set up your placement
Give the placement a name under Placement name. Names must be unique and can only contain lowercase alphanumeric characters and dashes.The Parent reservation is fixed—the placement is scoped to the reservation you launched the flow from and can’t be changed.
Configure your placement
Define how many hosts you need and how they should be distributed:
- Configure network connectivity — choose the VPC the placement’s servers attach to.
- Host Count — the number of hosts to allocate. The maximum is the capacity still free in the reservation.
- Placement Policy — choose Pack or Spread (see Placement policy).
Configure each host
Choose what every host in the placement runs:
- Security groups — attach one or more security groups from the selected VPC to control network traffic.
- OS Image — select the operating system and default packages installed on every node.
Choose an SSH key
Attach an SSH certificate authority that authorizes login on every host in this placement. Select an existing SSH key from your organization, or add a new one.
Advanced configuration (optional)
Optionally paste a cloud-config YAML file to customize your cluster at first boot. This is applied only during creation and can’t be changed later.
Provisioning time scales with placement size. The servers in a placement provision in parallel, so larger placements take longer to become fully ready—expect longer waits as host count grows. Provisioning throughput also decreases as you scale up, because the work is shared across the fabric. Track progress from each server’s status in the Servers tab.
View a placement
Open a placement from the reservation’s Placements tab. The detail view shows a header strip with the policy, VPC, host readiness, and OS image, plus two tabs:- Servers — every server the placement launched, with its private IP, GPU and CPU counts, and status.
- Security Groups — the security groups attached to the placement.
Manage servers
The Servers tab lists every server the placement launched. Each server reports a provisioning status:| Status | Description |
|---|---|
| Provisioning | The server is being created |
| Provisioned | The server is ready for use |
| Error | The server failed to provision |
| Deprovisioning | The server is being torn down |
- Stop a server to shut it down.
- Reboot a server—choose a soft reboot (graceful) or a hard reboot (power cycle).
Servers are managed as part of the placement. They can’t be deleted individually—deleting the placement removes all of its servers.
Delete a placement
Deleting a placement stops and removes all of its servers and releases their hosts back to the reservation.Open the placement
Go to the placement’s detail view, open the actions menu, and choose Delete Placement.
De-provisioning can take a while. Each server goes through a full clean-up cycle before its host is released, so deleting a large placement may take some time. You don’t have to wait for it to finish—another placement can be created in the same reservation in parallel while a placement de-provisions.
Next steps
- Review reservations and how capacity is reserved.
- Manage placements and servers from the command line with the CLI.
- Explore the full Placement API reference.