Announcing DPU-based Acceleration for NSX
We’re delighted to announce that VMware NSX can now leverage DPU-based acceleration using SmartNICs. This new implementation allows VMware customers to run NSX networking and security services on DPUs, providing accelerated NSX networking and security performance for applications that need high throughput, low latency connectivity and security. The DPU-based implementation also enhances network observability across different workload types while simultaneously increasing the host resources available to applications.
DPU-based Acceleration for NSX is a result of Project Monterey, an initiative that VMware began two years ago. VMware is delivering on Project Monterey with VMware vSphere 8, announced this week at VMware Explore. Combined with other future innovations introduced by Project Monterey, such as the ability to support VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) networking and storage for bare-metal workloads, DPU-based NSX acceleration will free up networking and security teams and developers more than ever from depending on generic host computing resources to power operations.

Figure 1: Solution Overview
While we’ll continue to offer full support for hypervisor-based NSX architectures, the option of running NSX on a DPU offers several major advantages for industries such as financial services, healthcare, government, and telecom providers that require accelerated network performance.