You may have heard that on Tuesday at VMworld 2020, VMware announced a partnership with NVIDIA called project Monterey. One of the central parts of this is using a SmartNIC’s (NVIDIA Mellanox BlueField-2 DPU) for services and boot images. This post details a lot of the materials that were released as part of the VMworld announcement as well as some other blogs from VMware on it.
Here is a great picture from Kit Colbert’s blog post providing an overview of the components of a SmartNIC which is a central core to Monterey.
Most VMworld content can be found at VMworld.com and is on demand. Some content though was live and so may not be available yet from the site.
Monterey was first introduced as part of the VMworld general session, you can watch it on demand as session GEN2859. You can start to get an idea of what project Monterey is all about.
To dig deeper into the announcement be sure to watch session VI3178 with Pat Gelsinger (VMware) and Jensen Huang (NVIDIA). This gives a good overview of it for those not deep into the technology.
Now lets cover the press releases on project Monterey:
The partnership press release: https://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-newsfeed.VMware-and-NVIDIA-to-Enable-Next-Gen-Hybrid-Cloud-Architecture-and-Bring-AI-to-Every-Enterprise.801b9b92-97a9-4a75-9074-116733900cb5.html
Project Monterey press release: https://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-newsfeed.VMware-Unveils-Project-Monterey-Re-Imagining-Hybrid-Cloud-Architecture-to-Support-Next-Generation-Applications.89238c82-cabf-4136-b66e-642617f10d40.html
NVIDIA’s partnership announcement: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/09/29/vmware-gelsinger-nvidia-huang/?ncid=so-twit-95535#cid=_so-twit_en-us
There are several good blogs that relate to project Monterey that should be part of your review:
NVIDIA Blog on what is a DPU: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/05/20/whats-a-dpu-data-processing-unit/ <– READ THIS IT’S IMPORTANT The DPU is a at the heart of project Monterey, it’s important to understand what a DPU and SmartNIC is.
Kit Colbert’s blog post announcing project Monterey: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2020/09/announcing-project-monterey-redefining-hybrid-cloud-architecture.html
Note that the breakout session (HCI3351) mentioned in Kit’s blog is not yet available in the content catalog. The same is true for the round tables HCP3047S and OCTO3150S. These 3 sessions are really good at getting deeper into the technology of Monterey.
OCTO3150S is a really good session outlining much of the content around project Monterey with Kit Colbert (VMware), Paul Perez (Dell), and Chris Lamb (NVIDIA). When it’s posted, it’s well worth the time to watch and really helps demystify Monterey.
Thursday, Kit was the day 1 keynote speaker at VMware’s Code Connect conference. He dug deeper into project Monterey today providing more technical detail than the sessions listed above or his blog. It’s worth the watch if you’re interested in how Monterey helps automate the data center at the hardware level. http://vmwarecodeconnect.github.io/CodeConnect2020/
Here are some screen grabs from Kit’s Code Connect keynote that I had tweeted out during the keynote:
That gets us to the current state of content. Next week, October 5, is the fall GPU Tech Conference (GTC). In my personal opinion the keynote is definitely worth watching, if you have a chance be sure to watch it live.
Update Oct 5: One of the things that is free to take in from GTC is the keynote, specifically part 5 of the GTC keynote where BlueField-2 DPU is discussed.
As part of GTC there are a whole lot of great sessions worth watching that may relate to Monterey, provided you have a GTC pass ($100).
The GTC sessions on DPUs I recommend catching are:
- The Next Generation of Fully-Integrated Data Centers [A21223]
- How to Secure Modern Data Centers [A21238] <– Important
- Securing and Accelerating the Enterprise Data Center with Data Processing Units (DPUs) [A21193]
- (On demand) DPUs, K8s, and ML: the Future of Compute (Presented by Canoical) [A22573]
- Dinner with Strangers – NVIDIA Spectrum Ethernet Switch based Interconnects for AI clusters and VMware Based Virtualized Infrastructure [DWS0CT74]
All that said realize that Monterey is a larger program than just SmartNICs/DPUs (NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs to be exact). So I expect we will probably see much more announced as Monterey progresses.
I hope this helps expand your knowledge of VMware’s project Monterey.
May your servers keep running and your data center always be chilled.
