VMware has announced cloud and edge infrastructure solutions to help organizations better run, scale and secure the broadest range of enterprise workloads across private and public clouds and at the edge. The company launched VMware vSphere 8 and VMware vSAN 8—major new releases of VMware’s compute and storage solutions—helping customers run the broadest set of workloads in the environments of their choice.

VMware vSphere 8 brings DPUs (Data Processing Units) into the fold along with CPUs and GPUs—making the future of modern infrastructure accessible to all enterprises. According to the company, vSphere 8 will deliver key innovations to help customers supercharge workload performance while lowering TCO, accelerate innovation for DevOps teams, improve operational efficiency and IT productivity, and bring the benefits of the cloud to their on-premises infrastructure.

By running infrastructure services on DPUs and isolating them from the workload domain, vSphere on DPUs will boost infrastructure security. Additionally, now in beta, NSX Distributed Firewall will offload to DPUs to scale customers’ security operations by securing East-West traffic at line rate without the need for software agents.

vSphere 8 will accelerate AI and machine learning applications by doubling the virtual GPU devices per VM, delivering a 4x increase of passthrough devices, and supporting vendor device groups which enable binding of high-speed networking devices and the GPU.

Through a next-generation storage platform optimized for modern hardware with hyperconverged infrastructure, vSAN 8 introduces breakthrough performance and hyper-efficiency. Built from the ground up, the new vSAN Express Storage Architecture will enhance the performance, storage efficiency, data protection and management of vSAN running on the latest generation storage devices. vSAN 8 will provide customers with a future ready infrastructure that supports modern TLC storage devices and delivers up to a 4x performance boost.

VMware Cloud Foundation+ introduces a new cloud-connected architecture for managing and operating full stack HCI in data centers. Built on vSphere+ and vSAN+, VMware Cloud Foundation+ will enable customers to gain greater operational efficiencies through easy management of VM and container-based enterprise workloads across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

VMware Edge Compute Stack 2 will help customers address the needs of simplicity and scale at the edge. New capabilities will include support for smaller cluster sizes—1 control node and 1 worker node—to run containers efficiently on smaller COTS (commercial, off the shelf) hardware. Additionally, the release will also offer higher performance with GPU passthrough support to enable AI/ML use cases. Both of these features will be enabled by new functionality in VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 2.0—helping bring simplicity and scale to the enterprise edge.

Today, VMware Edge Compute Stack supports x86 hardware only. In a future release, VMware, for the first time, will introduce initial support for non-x86 processor-based specialized small form factor edge platforms to simultaneously run IT/OT workloads and workflows on a single stack.

VMware Cloud Foundation+, VMware vSphere 8, VMware vSAN 8 and VMware Edge Compute Stack 2 are all expected to be available by October 28, 2022.