Using DPUs Hands-on Lab with the NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU and VMware vSphere Demo
At STH, we have been covering DPUs for many years. Enough time to see some solutions flourish and others fail. While DPUs have been deployed in the cloud for many years, bringing that cloud-like deployment model to the Enterprise has been much slower, if not impossible. Now with VMware vSphere 8, organizations with VMware deployments can start taking advantage of DPUs. That project has gone from theory to deployment and we were able to check it out.
As a quick note, we normally would not be prioritized to get access for this NVIDIA LaunchPad demo. We are saying that NVIDIA is sponsoring this piece. Like all pieces on STH, NVIDIA, and VMware did not get to review this piece before it went live to maintain editorial independence. NVIDIA did help show us around the demo environment before we started our walk-through and testing. That was necessary in this case to ensure our first time setting this up was not going to be done incorrectly.
We have covered the NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU on STH many times. One way to think about BlueField-2 is that it is a NVIDIA ConnectX-6 network interface with an Arm core complex, its own memory, storage, out-of-band networking, a PCIe switch, and accelerators.
