AMD is showing how its $1.9 billion bet on data processing unit (DPU) vendor Pensando has paid off at VMware Explore, including through the chipmaker's VMware Architecture Migration Tool (VAMT).

AMD claims Pensando's DPU technology has increased the power efficiency and performance of its data center systems. Specifically, a system powered by AMD's latest EPYC 9654 CPUs and a Pensando DPU offers more than three times the Redis performance and just under two times the aggregate network throughput than that same EPYC CPU paired with standard NICs, according to Robert Hormuth, AMD corporate VP of architecture and strategy.

Regardless of efficiency or performance, businesses have always struggled to shift from one data center architecture to another, even within the same vendor's product generations. Differences in micro architecture, software or applications are often at fault.

"When you take a closer look at the GPU assets that the competition is rolling out," for instance, "there is no software compatibility," Hormuth said, adding that AMD is "highly differentiated" from its rivals on that front. "When you go to that next generation, in our case, we have full capability to take all software assets – whether it is our software assets, or that happens to be a cloud customer's assets, or it happens to be ecosystem assets like VMware – all of that software is fully capable of moving to that next generation," he said.

Considering most enterprises use VMware products and services "in some way, shape or fashion," AMD launched an architecture migration tool specifically designed for compatibility with VMware. The tool automates the process of cold migrating data center machines between clusters with different architecture types, provided those clusters reside in the same vCenter.

VAMT was designed to "make it easy for IT to use within their existing tooling and scripting infrastructure," Hormuth noted. "This is not replacing other tools – it's to enhance."

To that point, the tool is architecture agnostic. "It doesn't matter if it's AMD to AMD, or comp[etitor] to comp, or AMD to comp." This freedom allows the end user to fully automate migrations while setting throttling limits and change windows.

Many situations necessitate a reboot or cold start in a VMware environment, like a vSphere update or host operating system driver that force restarts. "Maybe there's a firmware update or an adapter that forces a restart," Hormuth added. "By providing [VAMT], it's helping our customers go much faster [and] automate that process to get from an older generation Intel microarchitecture to a newer AMD architecture," for example.