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.