VMware Project Monterey

Main article: IT Service Management (ITSM)

2020: Announcement of Project Monterey

On October 1, 2020 the VMware company announced the Project Monterey technology intended for development of architecture of data processing centers, cloud infrastructure and peripheral calculations.

Project Monterey

For October, 2020 the companies implement harder and harder applications — the cloud-native platforms, machine learning, services of stream processing in real time. All of them assume use and processing of large volume of data. Rajiv Ramasvami, the chief operating officer on products and cloud services of VMware noted

According to the company as the organizations create and upgrade applications, opportunities of traditional IT architecture become insufficiently to conform to requirements of such applications. The applications of the next generation relying on a 5G, cloud native, machine learning, a multi-cloud and hybrid technologies distributed on the different systems put before the companies calls, including consumption of increasing number of cycles on server CPU for maintenance of work of system services that has negative effect on performance.

Project Monterey

For support of applications many organizations implement the specialized systems with hardware accelerators, such as graphic processors (GPU), programmable gate arrays (FPGA) and network controllers with opportunities of unloading of problems of traffic handling. These solutions optimize application performance, but at the same time demand from IT specialists of highly specialized skills for work with such systems, lead to "loskutnost" of an operational model, growth of complexity and requirements to security that finally increases total cost of ownership (TCO).

VMware will develop VMware Cloud Foundation (vSphere, vSAN and NSX) for support of SmartNIC technologies, the component of infrastructure which is carrying out a part of tasks of data processing which are carried out usually by the system processor. Thanks to support of SmartNIC VMware Cloud Foundation will use resources of the central processor of the server only for virtualization of computing resources, unloading functions of input-output of networks and DWH in the SmartNIC processor. It will allow applications to use more effectively available network bandwidth, saving at the same time cycles of the central processor for the bigger performance of applications. The VMware company took the first step in this direction, having provided ESXi hypervisor opportunities for work on SmartNIC.

The VMware company will change architecture of VMware Cloud Foundation to provide disaggregation of infrastructure, including emergence of support of not virtualized servers. Thanks to it the application started on one physical server will be able to use resources of the hardware accelerator, such as graphic processors (GPU), from other physical servers. It will also allow to provide access to physical resources on the basis of rules or using the program interface API adapted to requirements of the application. Besides, as ESXi works for SmartNIC, the organizations will be able to use a single system for infrastructure management both in virtual, and in a physical medium. Transfer of network functions, managements of the data warehouse and safety from a primary server allows to update these functions irrespective of the server. Each SmartNIC network interface card can start the multifunction firewall with status monitoring and an expanded set of means of protecting. As it will work on the net board, but not on a host, there will be an opportunity to unroll and configure the necessary number of small firewalls for protection of each of the microservices forming the application. It will allow to create individual protection which can be configured automatically for tens of thousands of application services.

Project Monterey will provide to the companies flexibility for adaptation of data processing centers, cloud or peripheral infrastructures for the purpose of performance improvement, availability and security. Within this project VMware will expand infrastructure for all applications, having reduced the need for the specialized systems, commands and management tools that will lower TCO.