Liqid, provider of the world’s most comprehensive composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) platform, today announced integration and support for composable hosts in VMware virtualized environments. With this new capability, Liqid customers can now deploy and scale host servers via software in seconds and centralize both physical and virtual infrastructure management within VMware with Liqid’s new vCenter Plug-in. By bringing Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure (CDI) to virtualized workloads, Liqid helps customers manage costs by improving resource utilization and reducing physical management of host servers – further driving the flexibility and agility of the cloud to datacenters and the edge.
These ecosystem integration-focused features expand the catalog of integrations begun with the recent launch of Liqid’s Dynamic SLURM Integration that automates the creation of bare metal servers to meet a SLURM job’s precise requirements from a multiverse of possible options. With VMware vCenter integration, Liqid is continuing to extend the tangible benefits of CDI into a growing number of significant areas within IT, further allowing more customers to realize revolutionary datacenter efficiencies with their existing physical servers composed with GPU, FPGA, and NVMe storage resources.
VMware has successfully redefined infrastructure efficiency and flexibility for decades now,” said Matt Halcomb, Principal Solutions Architect, World Wide Technology (WWT). “We believe Liqid's composable software will enable our customers to extract increased value from VMware virtualization by drastically accelerating virtual host deployment and scaling straight from vCenter. As modern workloads increase in complexity, Liqid’s software defined hardware allows customer to deploy a fully adaptive bare-metal host environment that compliments VMware’s capabilities.”
While enterprise organizations have been utilizing VMware’s virtualization solutions to address high-value applications such as AI and machine learning, the conventional servers used to host these applications delay time deploy and scale, lack flexibility, and are inefficient, ultimately limiting the value of virtualization by restricting configuration possibilities and increasing datacenter costs. Further, these server configurations prevent critical accelerator resources such as GPU, FPGA, NVMe, and memory from being shared across the network, leading to poor utilization. The manual tasks of moving resources and deploying and scaling hosts increase operational costs.
For organizations utilizing VMware’s virtualization solutions to derive maximum value from their data center, Liqid introduces composable hosts for virtualized environments. With Liqid Matrix CDI, bare-metal host servers can be created via software and matched perfectly to the resource requirements of any given virtual machine to accelerate time-to-value, and increase the agility and efficiency of their new and existing VMware virtual server, desktop and hyperconverged infrastructure environments.
The Liqid vCenter Plug-in for VMware vCenter Server provides a web-based tool integrated with the VMware vSphere Web Client user interface that allows customers to compose bare-metal hosts, add and remove resources, and view key configuration information in their VMware vCenter.
The new features offer customers the following:
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Be More Cloud-like: Realize cloud-like, dynamic resource orchestration for bare-metal resources for data centers on-prem, at the edge, or within traditional cloud environments.
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Accelerate Host Deployment: Reduce host server deployment times from days or weeks to minutes via software composability for accelerated ROI.
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Scale Physical Resources on Demand: When host severs need more storage or accelerator resources, add them hands-free, in seconds without regard for what will physically fit in a server.
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Meet Impossible Workload Needs: Liqid composability removes the server chassis as the limiting factor when designing a host server. Since GPU and storage resources can reside outside the server, anything is possible, including 1U servers with 16GPUs.
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Be Change Ready: With Physical hosts that are as nimble as your virtual environment, you can adapt to new reality quicker and realize the benefits sooner.
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Increased Resource Utilization: Overprovisioning often leads to trapped, unused resources. With Liqid, only deploy the resources a host needs today. If GPU resources aren’t utilized at night, redeploy them during off hours to maximize results.
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Reduce Manual Tasks: Instead of spending time manually doing physical adds and changes, leverage vCenter to complete tasks, hands-free.
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Leverage Existing Investments: Most importantly, Liqid plugs into the existing infrastructure, making VMware virtual environments more flexible, agile and efficient.
About Liqid
Liqid provides the world’s most comprehensive software-defined composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) platform. Liqid Matrix™ software enables users to dynamically right size their IT resources on the fly. Liqid empowers users to manage, scale, and configure physical, bare-metal server systems in seconds and then reallocate core data center devices on-demand, via Liqid Matrix software, as workflows and business needs evolve.