Looks to be still figuring out what to do with it, rather than prepping product
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VMware has offered its customers the chance to use its flagship ESXi hypervisor running on SmartNICs.
The virtualization giant yesterday announced an Early Access Program for Project Monterey – the effort to run ESXi on network accelerators and treat the devices as just another host that can run virtual machines and be managed by vSphere and vCenter.
Plenty of network accelerators – a term
The Register uses here because the industry is split on whether to call them SmartNICs, data-processing units or infrastructure processing units – run CPUs that use the Arm architecture. Project Monterey is therefore important to VMware, both in the context of its desire to become a player in 5G infrastructure and in its wish to have accelerators improve performance of more conventional data centres – just as they ve done for hyperscalers. VMware also hopes to ensure vSphere remains relevant as Arm