diff --git a/open_instruct/ppo_vllm_thread_ray_gtrl.py b/open_instruct/ppo_vllm_thread_ray_gtrl.py
index ce39d0ff6..085133203 100644
--- a/open_instruct/ppo_vllm_thread_ray_gtrl.py
+++ b/open_instruct/ppo_vllm_thread_ray_gtrl.py
@@ -251,6 +251,8 @@ class Args:
     """number of vLLM Engines, set to 0 to disable vLLM"""
     vllm_tensor_parallel_size: int = 1
     """tensor parallel size of vLLM Engine for multi-GPU inference"""
+    vllm_enforce_eager: bool = False
+    """whether to enforce eager mode for vLLM -- slow inference but needed for multi-node"""
     vllm_sync_backend: str = "nccl"
     """DeepSpeed -> vLLM weight sync backend"""
     enable_prefix_caching: bool = False
@@ -1683,6 +1685,7 @@ def main(args: Args, dataset_config: DatasetConfig, model_config: ModelConfig):
     vllm_engines = create_vllm_engines(
         args.vllm_num_engines,
         args.vllm_tensor_parallel_size,
+        args.vllm_enforce_eager,
         model_config.model_name_or_path,
         model_config.model_revision,
         args.seed,
diff --git a/open_instruct/vllm_utils2.py b/open_instruct/vllm_utils2.py
index 7dbdf6a54..0d824f8c0 100644
--- a/open_instruct/vllm_utils2.py
+++ b/open_instruct/vllm_utils2.py
@@ -192,6 +192,7 @@ def stop_remote_worker_execution_loop(self):
 def create_vllm_engines(
     num_engines: int,
     tensor_parallel_size: int,
+    enforce_eager: bool,
     pretrain: str,
     revision: str,
     seed: int,
@@ -224,6 +225,7 @@ def create_vllm_engines(
                 tokenizer_revision=revision,
                 trust_remote_code=True,
                 tensor_parallel_size=tensor_parallel_size,
+                enforce_eager=enforce_eager,
                 dtype="bfloat16",
                 seed=seed + i,
                 enable_prefix_caching=enable_prefix_caching,