VMware has quietly walked its SmartNIC ambitions

VMware has ceased selling firewalls for SmartNICs, a development that caught many off guard. SmartNICs, or data processing units (DPUs), are a type of network card equipped with a small processor, which can handle network functions more efficiently. Hyperscale cloud providers frequently employ SmartNICs to offload security and networking tasks to their processors, thereby freeing up CPU cores for their customers.

This approach also enhances isolation and security, a claim frequently made by AWS with its "Nitro" system, which relies on SmartNICs. VMware's foray into private cloud solutions was predicated on the premise that its customers would value an on-premises version of public cloud capabilities. Consequently, VMware adapted its hypervisor to run on SmartNICs, enabling them to host network functions and developing a version of its NSX distributed firewall for this purpose.

During VMware Explore, Umesh Mahajan, vice president and general manager of Broadcom's application networking and security division, confirmed that VMware had exited this market. According to Mahajan, while VMware managed to get its products running on SmartNICs from AMD and Nvidia, the compatibility with Intel hardware proved challenging.

The effort was complex due to the involvement of microcode. Despite the product's functionality, potential buyers showed little enthusiasm, citing a lack of interest in purchasing. As conventional NICs have evolved and increased throughput, the benefits of SmartNICs have diminished. Hence, VMware quietly stopped selling the distributed firewall.

The Distributed Services Engine, which allows VMware's Cloud Foundation suite to utilize SmartNICs, remains a part of the product, receiving ongoing support. VMware also continues to explore methods to streamline the customer experience and adapt its product strategy as necessary. They have developed a direct offloading capability that accelerates network traffic with ConnectX-7, a different approach from the Distributed Services Engine.

This development is part of VMware's ongoing commitment to enhancing customer infrastructure efficiency. Additionally, VMware's focus extends to memory tiering, global deduplication, and its AI Factory. Nvidia also uses the term "AI factory" to describe a setup comprising hardware including SmartNICs necessary for scale inferencing.

VMware and Nvidia maintain a strong partnership. VMware is almost certainly not done with SmartNICs entirely. The distributed Services Engine, developed to run on SmartNICs, might still be applicable to VMware's version of ESX for Arm, given that many SmartNIC processors use the Arm architecture.