VMware vSphere 8 Release Spawns Debut of Nvidia BlueField, AMD Pensando DPUs
Learn when Dell, HPE and Lenovo plan to ship the first servers with DPUs and vSphere 8.
August 31, 2022
VMWARE EXPLORE — The release of VMware vSphere 8 promises to drive a new class of virtual servers powered by GPUs and DPUs. AMD and Nvidia revealed on Tuesday that servers powered by their respective DPUs are set to arrive this fall.
OEMs Dell Technologies, HPE and Lenovo are among the first planning to ship servers with DPUs, or data processing units. The companies announced their deliverables at the VMware Explore conference in San Francisco. VMware’s vSphere 8 is the outgrowth of Project Monterey, the company’s next-generation virtualization platform, which includes support for SmartNICs. Project Monterey also consists of a redesign of VMware Cloud Foundation.
VMware designed the new Distributed Services Engine in vSphere 8 to modernize infrastructures into a distributed architecture. Using servers that have DPUs, VMware said it would support modern distributed workloads with accelerated networking.
VMware’s Raghu Raghuram
“In a single server, a single compute infrastructure, you have a variety of processors, the CPU, the GPU, and an exciting new processor called the data processing unit on vSphere,” VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram said during the opening keynote at VMware Explore.
Raghuram added that vSphere 8 “is going to be the single platform that allows you to deploy and manage workloads and run them effectively and securely regardless of the underlying costs or technologies. This is going to allow you to run not only today’s applications but the next decade of AI and machine learning applications and data applications.”
DPUs are “basically NICs on steroids,” added Duncan Epping, chief technologist in VMware’s office of the CTO. “NICs [have] a lot more CPU power, memory capacity and bandwidth/throughput. These devices not only enable you to push more packets and do it faster, but they also provide the ability to run services directly on these cards.”