Home > Servers > PowerEdge and VMware > White Papers > DPUs in the new vSphere 8.0 and 16th Generation Dell PowerEdge Servers > VMware vSphere 8.0 Distributed Services Engine and Data Processing Units – DPU
VMware claims breakthrough workload performance with vSphere 8.0 launch, to meet the throughput and latency needs of modern distributed workloads by accelerating networking functions through data processing units (DPUs). With vSphere Distributed Services Engine, infrastructure services are distributed across the different compute resources available on the ESXi host. vSphere Distributed Services Engine offloads and accelerates infrastructure functions on the DPU by introducing a VMware vSphere Distributed Switch on the DPU and VMware NSX Networking and Observability. WThese functions allows to proactively monitor, identify, and mitigate network infrastructure bottlenecks without complex network taps. The DPU becomes a new control point to scale infrastructure functions and enables security controls that are agentless and decoupled from the workload domain, resulting in better consolidation and efficient performance of the workloads. As mentioned earlier, this enables separation of roles with the CPU performing application workload tasks and the DPU focused on network, security, and storage infrastructure tasks.
DPUs are special devices with enough resources to function specific tasks having multiple general-purpose compute cores, memory, and a hypervisor running on the device independently from the ESXi hypervisor installed on the host server. The ESXi hypervisor that runs on the DPU device is a fully functional hypervisor, but it can only run on ARM CPU architectures. This ESXi on the DPU cannot host or provision and run virtual machines and workloads. The hypervisor that runs on DPU devices is a trimmed version of the ESXi hypervisor that runs on your servers, optimized for I/O activities. VMware vSphere 8.0 Distributed Services Engine today supports DPU devices from AMD Pensando Distributed Services Card and Nvidia Bluefield.