vSphere 8.0 introduces the VMware vSphere®Distributed Services Engine™ feature which allow offloading of some of your networking operations from an x86 host to a data processing unit (DPU). You can migrate virtual machines in a vSphere 8.0 environment with hosts that have data processing units (DPUs).
In vSphere 8.0, if you enable network offloads to a DPU device, you can use vSphere vMotion for migrating virtual machines when both hosts have DPU devices. To enable vMotion between hosts with DPU devices, you must perform multiple steps on the virtual machines, on the vCenter Server system, and on VMware NSX.
- Create a vSphere Distributed Switch on a data center and enable the network offloads compatibility on the vSphere Distributed Switch. For more information about how to enable the network offloads compatibility on a host with a DPU device, see What is Network Offloads Capability in the vSphere Networking documentation.
- Add to the switch only hosts with DPUs from the same vendor and of the same model.
- Deploy NSX and configure an NSX transport node for the vSphere Distributed Switch. See the NSX Installation Guide documentation.
- Enable the UPT support on the virtual machine that you want to migrate to and from a host with DPU devices. See Add a Network Adapter to a Virtual Machine in the vSphere Virtual Machine Administration documentation.
You can also use a DPU device on a host as a standard NIC. In this case, no additional configuration is required and you can use vSphere vMotion to migrate virtual machines to and from hosts with and without DPU devices.
