VMware Quietly Ends SmartNIC Firewall Sales After Lackluster Demand

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VMware’s bet on bringing hyperscale hardware to the mainstream failed to excite customers, but the technology may yet endure

VMware has quietly ceased selling firewalls designed for SmartNICs.

SmartNICs—also known as data processing units (DPUs)—are network interface cards equipped with embedded processors. Hyperscale cloud providers routinely deploy these devices to manage security and networking tasks by running network functions as virtual machines on the SmartNIC’s processor. Cloud operators favor SmartNICs because they free up CPU cores for customer workloads. Running housekeeping tasks on SmartNICs can also enhance isolation and security, as AWS frequently highlights with its Nitro system.

VMware’s entry into private cloud assumed customers wanted an on-premises equivalent of public cloud infrastructure. When the company was independent, it anticipated that customers would adopt hyperscaler approaches to hardware and therefore adapted its hypervisor to operate on SmartNICs, enabling them to host network functions. VMware also developed a version of its NSX distributed firewall to run on these devices.

At its VMware Explore conference earlier this month, Umesh Mahajan, vice president and general manager of Broadcom’s application networking and security division, stated that the virtualization giant has “walked back from that space.”

Mahajan noted that VMware successfully deployed its products on SmartNICs from AMD and Nvidia but encountered difficulties with Intel hardware due to microcode complexities.

Once VMware achieved product compatibility, buyers remained unenthusiastic. “Customers kept talking, but not buying,” Mahajan said, making continued development difficult to justify.

Meanwhile, conventional NICs evolved with increased throughput, reducing the advantages SmartNICs once offered.

VMware has therefore quietly discontinued the distributed firewall.

“VMware was ahead of the industry in using DPUs, or SmartNICs, to offload capabilities and improve data center infrastructure efficiency; however, the overall ecosystem around SmartNICs has been slow to materialize,” a VMware spokesperson told The Register.

The Distributed Services Engine enabling VMware’s flagship Cloud Foundation suite to utilize SmartNICs remains part of the product and continues to receive support.

“We’ve also continued looking at ways to simplify the customer experience and adapt our product approach as needed,” the spokesperson wrote. For example, the company developed a direct offloading capability that accelerates network traffic with ConnectX-7—a different mechanism than the Distributed Services Engine. This reflects VMware’s continued focus on providing customers practical paths to infrastructure efficiency.

The spokesperson also pointed to VMware innovating with memory tiering, global deduplication, and its AI Factory.

Nvidia also uses the term “AI factory” to describe a collection of hardware—including SmartNICs—necessary to run inferencing at scale. VMware and Nvidia are firm partners, and the virtualization pioneer has also teamed up with AMD, whose own “Helios” rack-scale AI rigs utilize SmartNICs.

VMware is therefore almost certainly not done with the devices forever. Because many SmartNIC processors use the Arm architecture, the work done to create the Distributed Services Engine may persist in VMware’s version of ESX for Arm.

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