VxRail and SmartDPUs—A Transformative Data Center Pairing
Tue, 17 Jan 2023 21:15:58 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
What VMware announced as Project Monterey back in September 2020 has finally come to fruition as the vSphere Distributed Services Engine. While that name may seem like a mouthful, it really does a great job of describing what the product does in just a few words.
vSphere Distributed Services Engine provides a consistent management and services platform to deliver dynamic hardware for the growing world of agile distributed applications. The vSphere Distributed Services Engine will, in the future, be the engine upon which non-hypervisor vSphere services run. Today it begins with NSX, but VMware has set its sights on moving vSAN storage and host management services to the vSphere Distributed Services Engine, thus freeing up x86 resources for virtual machines, containers, and the applications they support.
Powering vSphere Distributed Services Engine is a new type of PCIe card known as a data processing unit (DPU), currently available from NVIDIA and AMD. At Dell, we are calling them SmartDPUs, as these PCIe cards and the software they run are the cornerstone of tomorrow’s disaggregated cloud-native data center.
From a hardware perspective, it would be easy to assume that a SmartDPU is just a fancy network card; after all, the most distinguishing external features are the SFP ports. But hiding under the large heatsink is a small powerful server with its own processor, memory, and storage. Most importantly is the programmable hardware I/O accelerator, the core of the SmartDPU that will deliver performance. The PowerEdge server team at Dell has gone a step further. They’ve tightly coupled the SmartDPUs with the existing PowerEdge iDRAC through the serial port and side-band server communication connections, bypassing the RJ45 management port. This allows the iDRAC to not only manage the PowerEdge server, but also to manage the SmartDPUs. As awesome as the hardware is, it needs software for its power to be unleashed.
This is where vSphere Distributed Services Engine comes into play. In this initial release, VMware is moving NSX and the networking and security services that it provides to the vSphere environment from the main x86 CPU and onto the SmartDPU. This provides several benefits: The most obvious is that this will free up x86 CPU resources for virtual machine and container workloads. Less obvious is the creation of an air gap between the NSX services and ESXi, enabling zero trust security. Does this mean that SmartDPUs are just an NSX offload card? Yes and no. VMware and the industry are taking the first small steps in what will be a leap forward for data center infrastructure and design. Future steps by VMware will expand the vSphere Distributed Services Engine to have storage and host management services running on the SmartDPUs, thus leaving the x86 CPU to run host virtual machines and containers.
VMware’s journey does not stop there, and these steps may seem blasphemous at first, but VMware will provide bare metal support, enabling Linux or Windows to be deployed on the x86 hardware. VMware acknowledges that not every workload is suited to run on vSphere, but that these workloads would benefit from the security, networking, and storage services provided by the vSphere Distributed Services Engine—transforming the data center, breaking down silo walls, distributing and aggregating any and all workloads.
Where does VxRail fit in all this? In the same place as we always have: Standing on the shoulders of the PowerEdge and VMware giants looking to remove complexity and friction from technology, making it easier and simpler for you to purchase, deploy, manage, update, and most importantly use this transformative technology. Freeing up your cycles to refactor your applications to meet the ever-growing needs of your business. VxRail will be supporting the vSphere Distributed Services Engine with the AMD Pensando and NVIDIA Bluefield-2 SmartDPUs on our core platforms—the E660F, V670F, and P670N. These nodes will be available in configurations for both VxRail with vSAN original storage architecture and VxRail dynamic nodes.
The journey of the modern data center is complex and ever changing, but with VxRail at your side you are in good company.
Author: David Glynn, Sr. Principal Engineer, VxRail Technical Marketing