VMware Evolves AI-Ready Infrastructure to Advance Digital Business

VMware has announced portfolio updates to help customers modernise their applications and infrastructure. The new releases of vSphere 7 and vSAN 7 will help IT teams support new and existing applications with infrastructure that is developer and AI-ready; scales without compromise; boosts infrastructure and data security; and simplifies operations.

“Infrastructure owners are racing to support exciting new containerized applications, such as advanced AI workloads, without compromising security,” said Lee Caswell, Vice President, Marketing, Cloud Platform Business Unit, VMware. “VMware is helping vSphere admins expand their influence beyond traditional virtualized applications to new enterprise AI environments through our partnership with NVIDIA, to high-capacity HCI use cases with HCI Mesh from vSAN, and to security-sensitive containerized workloads that can benefit from the SEV-ES security feature in AMD EPYC processors. These new capabilities allow infrastructure to seamlessly meet the rapid pace of application change.”  

Updates to the AI-Ready Enterprise platform include:

• NVIDIA has exclusively certified the new VMware vSphere 7 Update 2 release for NVIDIA AI Enterprise suite, a cloud-native collection of optimized AI applications and frameworks, for an end-to-end AI solution;
• vSphere 7 Update 2 introduces support for the NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs in NVIDIA-Certified Systems. This, with NVIDIA AI Enterprise, enables customers to fold-in an end-to-end AI solution with confidence on their existing enterprise virtualization platform, instead of running AI projects in separate unmanageable IT silos; and,
• Customers are also able to incorporate the latest generation of NVIDIA GPUs into their virtual environment and take advantage of features like Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) allowing GPU cycles to be shared across multiple users; vSphere vMotion to provide live migration for non-disruptive operations; and vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) for automatic initial workload placement to avoid performance bottlenecks. 

“NVIDIA AI Enterprise is a software suite optimised, certified and supported on VMware vSphere that enables customers to rapidly deploy, manage and scale AI in production with confidence,” said Justin Boitano, Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise and Edge Computing, NVIDIA. “Through NVIDIA’s collaboration with VMware, IT professionals can now support business teams with the industry’s most trusted AI tools across their hybrid cloud infrastructure.”

In September 2020, VMware introduced vSphere with Tanzu to deliver Kubernetes to the fingertips of millions of IT admins across the globe. The latest update delivers a faster, more scalable and secure application experience by including VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer Essentials as part of vSphere with Tanzu. This provides customers with VMware supported L4 load balancing for Kubernetes clusters with Kubernetes native automation and seamless upgrade path to the full capabilities of the NSX Advanced Load Balancer Enterprise Edition. To help customers stay current with Kubernetes, vSphere with Tanzu includes a refreshed Supervisor with the Kubernetes 1.19 release featuring critical enhancements to simplify upgrades and leads to more predictability and stability overall. Customers can purchase any of the VMware Tanzu editions as an add-on to vSphere entitling them to run Kubernetes as part of their vSphere environment.

VMware vSphere 7 Update 2 and VMware vSAN 7 Update 2 are available now.