التكنولوجيا وأخبارها بوابة الإمارات لتكنولوجيا المعلومات والإتصالات
VMware Introduces Delivery of Elastic Infrastructure for AI/ML Applications with
VMware vSphere 7
Ihab Farhoud_VMware
VMware vSphere 7 Integrates Bitfusion Technology to
Enable Enterprises to Efficiently Abstract, Pool and
Automate Delivery of GPU Resources On-Demand for AI /
ML Applications
New Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI and HPC to Leverage
VMware Software
VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today introduced a new
integrated feature in VMware vSphere 7 that will enable
enterprises to deliver elastic infrastructure on-demand for
artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
applications. This new feature—VMware vSphere Bitfusion
—is developed out of VMware’s 2019 acquisition of
Bitfusion, a pioneer in the virtualization of hardware
accelerator resources including graphics processing unit
(GPU) technology.
Organizations use hardware accelerators such as GPUs to
dramatically improve the performance of AI/ML workloads
that may run several hours or longer. IT teams have come
to realize that these hardware accelerators are isolated
islands—unable to be shared across many parts of the
business. The inability to share those resources leads to
inefficient and poor utilization of both existing and newly
purchased resources. The combination of Bitfusion and
VMware vSphere will help organizations achieve cost
savings, enable resource sharing out of the box, and deliver
the right hardware accelerator resource, like a GPU, to the
right workload at the right time.
“We aim to deliver the same value to GPUs that we
delivered for CPUs,” said Ihab Farhoud, Director, Solutions
Engineering – METNA, VMware Middle East, Turkey and
North Africa. “By breaking down existing silos of GPU
resources, organizations will be able to achieve better
utilization and efficient use of them through sharing—
resulting in immediate cost savings. More importantly,
organizations will be able to jumpstart new or stalled
AI/ML initiatives to drive their business forward by sharing
those GPU resources with their teams on-demand with
VMware vSphere 7.”
VMware vSphere 7 with Bitfusion Enables Efficient GPU
Pooling and Sharing
AI and ML-based applications—deep learning training in
particular—rely on hardware accelerators to tackle large
and complex computation. With the newly integrated
Bitfusion capabilities, VMware vSphere 7 will enable
enterprises to pool their powerful GPU resources on their
servers and share them within their data centers. That will
enable organizations to efficiently and rapidly share GPUs
across the network with teams of AI researchers, data
scientists and ML developers relying on and/or building
AI/ML applications.
Released in April 2020, VMware vSphere 7 was
rearchitected into an open platform using Kubernetes to
provide a cloud-like experience for developers and
operators. The Bitfusion feature of VMware vSphere 7 will
leverage GPUs for applications running in virtual machines
or containers. Bitfusion can operate in a Kubernetes
environment such as VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, and is
expected to run side-by-side as customers deploy AI/ML
applications as part of an overall modern applications
strategy. The Bitfusion feature of VMware vSphere will be
available through a single download with no disruption to
current infrastructure and will seamlessly integrate with
existing workflows and lifecycles.
VMware acquired Bitfusion last year with the intention to
integrate the technology into VMware vSphere. Bitfusion
offered a software platform that decoupled specific physical
resources from the servers they are attached to in the
environment. This included sharing GPUs in a virtualized
infrastructure, as a pool of network-accessible resources,
rather than isolated resources per server.
Dell Technologies Taps VMware for Dell EMC Ready
Solutions
Today, Dell Technologies also announced two new Ready
Solutions: Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI: GPU-as-a-
Service and Dell EMC Ready Solutions for Virtualized High
Performance Computing (HPC). Read more details here.
With the new Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI: GPU-as-a-
Service, customers will be able to quickly and conveniently
take advantage of GPUs to supercharge AI projects
including predictive analytics, machine learning and deep
learning. These Ready Solutions will incorporate VMware
Cloud Foundation including VMware vSphere Bitfusion
along with Dell EMC servers, storage, networking and
services. These solutions will help customers to provide
developers and data scientists self-service access to a
virtualized accelerator pool to increase the utilization and
efficiency of these valuable resources.
The new Dell EMC Ready Solutions for Virtualized HPC
(vHPC) will make it simpler for organizations to run
demanding AI applications in VMware environments. The
ability to virtualize HPC and AI operations with VMware
Cloud Foundation including VMware vSphere Bitfusion or
VMware vSphere Scale-Out Edition will offer rapid
hardware provisioning on demand, faster initial setup, and
configuration and ongoing maintenance with centralized
management and security. Dell EMC Ready Solutions for
vHPC support the intensive compute needs for
bioinformatics, computational chemistry and computer-
aided engineering.
Supporting Quote
“What we’re seeing among data science departments is
that many of their artificial intelligence applications are
already running in containers. There’s a great opportunity
for us to serve them better by combining vSphere with
Bitfusion and the native scaling abilities of vSphere with
Kubernetes to accelerate their research.” – Johan van
Amersfoort, Technologist EUC & AI, ITQ Consultancy
Pricing and Availability
VMware vSphere Bitfusion is expected to become available
in VMware’s Q2 FY21. The new feature is part of the
VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus edition entitlement
