VMware Platform Services deploying Tanzu with Intel Hardware

VMware and Intel collaboration demonstrates how tiered memory with Intel® OptaneTM persistent memory (PMem) enables up to a 66% reduction in the number of servers while increasing memory per server tenfold. VMware Tanzu is a popular container platform—and VMware itself runs its own containerized applications on Tanzu. Like its customers that use Tanzu, VMware Platform Services (VPS) faces data center challenges—tight IT budgets, memory-hungry modern workloads, and outdated hardware. VMware recently collaborated with Intel to determine the viability of upgrading hardware to consolidate servers and use tiered memory to provide Tanzu’s containerized workloads with more memory than the existing legacy hardware could support. Following best practices developed by Intel for right-sizing tiered memory systems, VMware data center architects monitored real-world, production, containerized workloads running on Tanzu to understand average memory and CPU utilization. The memory metrics gathered for the legacy server environment indicated that VMware’s Tanzu deployment was a good fit for a tiered memory system with Intel Optane persistent memory (PMem). In a tiered memory configuration, Intel Optane PMem serves as main capacity memory and a small amount of 3,200 MT/s DRAM serves as a cache. Tiered memory enabled VMware to replace 27 legacy blade servers with nine newer 1U servers equipped with 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. As a result, per-server memory capacity increased from 384 GB to 4 TB, while lowering memory costs by up to 33%. In summary, VMware’s deployment of tiered memory for their production Tanzu environment proves that Intel Optane PMem enables massive server consolidation—reducing the number of servers by as much as 66%—and provides vast amounts of memory for VMware Tanzu containers at an affordable $/GB.