This year at VMworld, VMware announced Project Monterey, a rearchitecture of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) from the hardware up to support various application requirements as customers deploy modern cloud-native applications over VCF.
Please refer to the “Project Monterey” blog here for more information.
VMware’s Project Monterey is an industry-wide collaboration to integrate SmartNICs like NVIDIA’s BlueField-2 data processing unit (DPU) and extends VCF to support various new possibilities, including:
Improved performance for application and infrastructure services
Enhanced visibility and application security
Bare metal operating systems and applications
Better overall TCO for various deployment scenarios like data center, edge, and cloud
In order to accomplish this, VMware is partnering with a broad set of SmartNIC vendors and server OEMs to deliver an integrated solution to its customers.
What is NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU?
The NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU is a new accelerated computing element that improves the performance, efficiency, scalability, and security of enterprise workloads. BlueField-2 integrates a system on a chip with various powerful technologies which are very well aligned with Project Monterey, such as:
Programmable multiple Arm cores (up to 8 cores) at 2.3GHz
Dual-channel DDR memory interface
High-performance PCIe Gen4 interface
State-of-the-art 2x100G SmartNIC networking to provide true dual 100G ports to the hosts
Power and scalable I/O virtualization like multiple PFs, VFs, NVMe, vmxnet3 etc.
A powerful set of networking, storage, and security accelerators
VMware’s Project Monterey along with NVIDIA DPU implements software-defined, hardware-accelerated data center on a chip functionality that improves enterprise workload performance, efficiency, scalability, and security.
Evolving VCF Architecture with NVIDIA BlueField-2
Project Monterey is a redesign and rethinking of VCF to take advantage of these disruptive hardware capabilities. Fundamentally we are moving functionality that used to run on the core CPU complex to the SmartNIC CPU complex like NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU:
At VMware, we are very pleased to partner with NVIDIA on this exciting new technology, and the journey starts now. Watch the replay of the special virtual event with VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang from VMworld 2020 here.
