VMware’s private cloud double-down looks set to continue, with the vendor reportedly axing firewall offerings for smartNICs.

The Register reports that the Broadcom-owned business has decided to stop sales of its NSX distributed firewalls for smart network interface cards, with Umesh Mahajan, Broadcom’s GM and VP of its application networking and security division, telling the publication that VMware has “walked back from that space.”

“Customers kept talking, but not buying,” the exec added.

VMware had added its NSX services-defined Firewall to smartNICs since the turn of the decade as part of its previous rearchitecture effort, dubbed Project Monterey. There, VMware’s software offering was paired with smartNICs from chip giants like Intel and Nvidia to effectively add a security air gap to hardware that offloads virtualization and security functions to free up CPU cycles.

“VMware was ahead of the industry in using data processing units (DPUs), or smartNICs, to offload capabilities and improve data center infrastructure efficiency; however, the overall ecosystem around smartNICs has been slow to materialize,” a VMware spokesperson said in a statement supplied to The Register.

Dropping the smartNIC firewall is far from an edge-hardware virtualization retreat, however, with VMware instead reframing its strategy around its flagship Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform as a means to help enterprises survive the data center memory squeeze.

Through capabilities like memory tiering, which moves inactive (cold) memory pages to lesser tiers to ensure optimal capacity is reserved for more expensive workloads, the vendor wants customers to use software intelligence to squeeze maximum efficiency out of their existing stack.

It is, however, the second VMware offering axed in the past month, with the vendor having called time on a software kit rivals rely on to migrate virtual machines away from the Broadcom-owned business.