VMware Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Innovations Enable Breakthrough Efficiency, Flexibility and Performance Gains

Today at VMware Explore 2022, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) unveiled cloud and edge infrastructure solutions featuring breakthrough innovations to help organizations better run, scale and secure the broadest range of enterprise workloads across private and public clouds and at the edge. 

VMware research shows 580 million modern workloads are expected to run on diverse, distributed environments spanning public cloud, on-premises, edge, telco clouds and hosted clouds by 2024.(1) Businesses are aiming to match their diverse enterprise application portfolios to the most optimal environments based on technical, business or strategic needs and low total cost of ownership (TCO). This is driving businesses to embrace multiple public clouds while continuing to invest in their on-premises environments and deploy services at the edge.

“In highly distributed environments, customers need cloud and edge infrastructure that enables them to scale their operations with consistency, availability, and security—wherever their workloads are running—and at the lowest possible TCO,” said Mark Lohmeyer, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Infrastructure Business Group, VMware. “With our multi-cloud and edge portfolio, VMware serves as the trusted foundation for customers seeking flexibility and choice to run their workloads where they’re best suited to run.” 

Significant Advancements Across Core Platform for Private and Public Clouds 

VMware today introduced VMware vSphere 8 and VMware vSAN 8—major new releases of VMware’s compute and storage solutions—helping customers run the broadest set of workloads in the environments of their choice. The innovations across these common building blocks for the private and public clouds and edge will help customers dramatically improve how they run, manage and secure their enterprise applications. The continued advancement of VMware Cloud further provides customers with consistent infrastructure with value-added capabilities. 

VMware vSphere 8: Ushers in a new era of heterogeneous computing by bringing DPUs (Data Processing Units) into the fold along with CPUs and GPUs—making the future of modern infrastructure accessible to all enterprises. vSphere 8 will deliver key innovations to help customers supercharge workload performance while lowering TCO, accelerate innovation for DevOps teams, improve operational efficiency and IT productivity, and bring the benefits of the cloud to their on-premises infrastructure. 

vSphere 8 will introduce vSphere on DPUs, previously known as Project Monterey. In close collaboration with technology partners AMD, Intel and NVIDIA as well as OEM system partners Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo, vSphere on DPUs will unlock hardware innovation helping customers meet the throughput and latency needs of modern distributed workloads. vSphere will enable this by offloading and accelerating network and security infrastructure functions onto DPUs from CPUs. Customer applications that need high network bandwidth and fast cache access such as in-memory databases can expect:

• Up to 20% CPU cores saved while achieving similar or better performance—resulting in higher workload consolidation and lower TCO by using saved cores;(2)
• Up to 36% higher transaction rate(2) at 27% lower latency(2) by leveraging freed CPU cores and better cache locality to drive more workload traffic, while benefitting from vSphere DRS and vMotion.

By running infrastructure services on DPUs and isolating them from the workload domain, vSphere on DPUs will boost infrastructure security. Additionally, now in beta, NSX Distributed Firewall will offload to DPUs to scale customers’ security operations by securing East-West traffic at line rate without the need for software agents. 

vSphere 8 will dramatically accelerate AI and machine learning applications by doubling the virtual GPU devices per VM, delivering a 4x increase of passthrough devices, and supporting vendor device groups which enable binding of high-speed networking devices and the GPU. For DevOps teams, vSphere 8 will include VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0(3)—expanding Kubernetes capabilities to include multi-availability zones for improved resilience as well as simplified cluster lifecycle and package management. The new Cloud Consumption Interface service(3) in vSphere 8 will provide developers and DevOps engineers a Kubernetes-based common API endpoint and UI that offers fast, easy access to IaaS services across VMware Cloud.