vSphere Distributed Services Engine – Networking Offload and Acceleration Preview

In my earlier overview of vSphere 8 announcements at VMware Explore 2022, I highlight a number of new products and features. One of the most significant announcements is vSphere Distributed Services Engine, formerly known as Project Monterey. As mentioned in the post, this enhancement gives us the ability to offload tasks to a Data Processing Unit (DPU aka SmartNIC). These tasks have historically been done by x86 CPUs on the hypervisor. Now these tasks are offloading to the DPU. And the programmable hardware accelerator on the DPU is also leveraged to boost overall performance. The first wave of innovation around…