VMware has quietly walked its SmartNIC ambitions

VMware has quietly stopped selling firewalls for SmartNICs. SmartNICs, aka data processing units (DPUs), are network cards that include a modest processor. Hyperscale clouds routinely use the devices to handle security and networking chores, by running network functions as VMs on the SmartNIC’s processor. Cloud operators like SmartNICs because they free CPU cores to rent to their customers. Running some housekeeping workloads on SmartNICs can also improve isolation and security – AWS often points to the benefits of its “Nitro” system which relies on SmartNICs. VMware’s push into private cloud assumed that its customers wanted an on-prem version of a public cloud – at least in terms of their operating model. Back when it was an independent company, VMware guessed that its customers would also appreciate borrowing from hyperscalers’ approach to hardware and therefore adapted its hypervisor to run on the SmartNICs so they could host network functions. It also created a version of its NSX distributed firewall to run on the devices. At its VMware Explore conference earlier this month, Umesh Mahajan, vice president and general manager of Broadcom's application networking and security division, said the virtualization giant has “walked back from that space.” Mahajan said VMware was able to get its wares running on SmartNICs from AMD and Nvidia but struggled with Intel hardware. The effort was non-trivial, Mahajan said, because it involved microcode. Once VMware got its product working, buyers weren’t excited. “Customers kept talking, but not buying,” Mahajan said, making it hard to justify ongoing development work. Meanwhile, conventional NICs evolved – and increased throughput – to the point at which SmartNICs afforded fewer benefits. VMware has therefore quietly stopped selling the distributed firewall. “VMware was ahead of the industry in using DPUs, or SmartNICs, to offload capabilities and improve data center infrastructure efficiency; however, the overall ecosystem around SmartNICs has been slow to materialize,” a VMware spokesperson told The Register. The Distributed Services Engine that allows VMware’s flagship Cloud Foundation suite to use SmartNICs remains a part of the product and continues to receive support. “We've also continued looking at ways to simplify the customer experience and adapt our product approach as needed,” the spokesperson wrote. For example, we've developed a direct offloading capability that accelerates network traffic with ConnectX-7, which is a different mechanism than the Distributed Services Engine. It's part of our continued focus on giving customers practical paths to infrastructure efficiency.” The spokesperson also pointed to VMware innovating with memory tiering, global deduplication and its AI Factory. Nvidia also uses the term “AI factory” to describe a collection of hardware – including SmartNICs – necessary to run inferencing at scale. VMware and Nvidia are firm partners. The virtualization pioneer has also teamed up with AMD, whose own “Helios” rack-scale AI rigs also use SmartNICs. VMware’s therefore almost certainly not done with the devices forever. And because many of the processors on SmartNICs use the Arm architecture, the work it did to create the Distributed Services Engine may live on in its version of ESX for Arm. ®