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26 Aug 2024Form Number
LP2008PDF size
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Abstract
Experience unparalleled performance with two, independent DPUs for maximum throughput and enhanced failover redundancy. Benefit from the industry-first synchronous lifecycle management and support for dual NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs on Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series with VMware Cloud Foundation co-engineered solution.
Introduction
Data Processing Units (DPUs) are rapidly becoming vital in modern data centers due to their ability to offload workloads from CPUs, enhancing efficiency and performance. They boost processing power by handling network functions, allowing CPUs to focus on application processing. DPUs also improve performance with hardware accelerators, reduce latency, and handle complex, data-intensive tasks like AI and deep learning.
Last year, we showcased how enterprises can benefit from a fully integrated solution with a single NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU on Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series. Today, we are happy to announce the first-ever fully integrated solution with dual DPU support for VMware Cloud Foundation, on Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series.
Eliminating Single Points of Failure
Customers are on the lookout for technology trends such as faster DPU port speeds and dual-active DPUs. To achieve faster business benefits, enterprises are seeking to streamline development, testing and deployment of generative AI applications.
As the DPUs are intended to work as “smart NICs”, the need for failover redundancy and high availability is a desired feature that drives adoption of DPUs among customers. Additionally, as performance optimization continues to be a priority, having an additional DPU working independently offers increased offload capacity for additional throughput for workloads.
With Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, customers can now configure up to 2x NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs, that operate independently and seamlessly within a single host.
Infrastructure Reliability with Accelerated Workload Performance
The initial release of the single DPU support on Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series introduced an innovative approach to accelerate and optimize IT infrastructure performance while embracing a zero-trust security with distributed firewalls offloaded to the NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU.
In addition to these key features, the introduction of dual DPU support with NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs on Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series provides:
- High Availability and Redundancy - Customers can configure the DPUs in an Active-Standby state to enhance redundancy. In this mode, if the active DPU fails, all traffic seamlessly fails over to the standby DPU, ensuring that there is no disruption in service. This configuration is perfect for mission-critical applications where uptime is paramount.
- Enhanced Performance - Both DPUs operate independently, providing maximum throughput. This configuration is ideal for environments where performance is critical, as it takes full advantage of the increased bandwidth with twice the capacity.
These are shown in the following figure.
Industry-First Synchronous Lifecycle Management of Dual DPUs with ThinkAgile VX
As the configuration involves the operation of three ESXi instances on a single server (primary host instance and instances on each of the two DPUs), it is critical to ensure that all the ESXi instances are remediated and kept up to date with the same version.
Together with VMware and NVIDIA, Lenovo introduces the industry-first synchronous lifecycle updates of dual DPUs with VMware vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM). This simplified, integrated support ensures that both DPU ESXi versions are remediated and kept up to date with the same version as the host ESXi instance, thereby simplifying management and ensuring consistency across your infrastructure.
Dual BlueField-2 DPU Availability on ThinkAgile VX Series
The dual DPU solution with Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series features the NVIDIA Bluefield-2 Data Processing Unit (DPU) with dual ports of 25GbE, an array of Arm cores, purpose-built hardware-acceleration engines, and full software programmability to leverage DPU hardware accelerators, providing breakthrough data center performance, efficiency and security for software-defined storage, networking, and management of workloads.
The feature is factory-installed, requires vSphere® 8.0 U3 or later, and is available on the Lenovo ThinkAgile VX650 V3-DPU model.
This solution caters to a wide range of HCI use cases in hybrid cloud environments, edge deployments and major applications include AI/ML modeling and inferencing, manufacturing and automation, business-critical applications, and large analytical databases.
Interested in Learning More?
Check out this VMware vSphere Breakroom Chat session featuring Neeraj Kuppam, General Manager Software Defined Infrastructure at Lenovo, with VMware and NVIDIA, where you will learn about the use cases and business requirements driving the adoption of dual DPUs and what the three organizations are doing together, to enable our customers meet these industry demands. Please contact your Lenovo Sales Representative, for more details.
Authors
Brian Faleiro is the Worldwide Technical Product Manager for Lenovo’s ThinkAgile VX Series of Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions based on VMware’s virtualization software ecosystem. Brian is responsible for showcasing the business value and differentiation of Lenovo’s hybrid cloud solutions and contributing to the product lifecycle process.
Catherine Maina is the Worldwide Senior Product Manager for Lenovo’s ThinkAgile VX Series, a hyper-converged engineered solution powered by VMware's virtualization software ecosystem. Catherine is responsible for identifying and commercializing opportunities that leverage joint Lenovo and VMware technology in the Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) space.
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