VMware HCX Capabilities in VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware HCX for expanding into VMware Cloud on AWS to seamlessly migrating your workloads and re-balancing them between your on-premises datacenters and the cloud, or between different public clouds.

The list of features included in this single VMware HCX generally available offering for VMware Cloud on AWS are: Replication Assisted vMotion, Mobility Optimized Networking, Mobility Groups with VMware vRealize Network Insight integration and Traffic Engineering features -TCP Flow Conditioning and Application Path Resiliency.

Replication Assisted vMotion (RAV)

RAV uses a combination of VMware replication and vMotion technologies for large-scale, parallel migrations with no service interruption with the ability to specify a switchover window. It means you can now create a migration schedule during which a large set of VMs (200 at this time) can move live (without any downtime) to VMware Cloud on AWS at the scheduled migration window.

Mobility Optimized Networking (MON)

For VMs migrated using VMware HCX from a source location to VMware Cloud on AWS, this capability enables the cloud-side VMs on the HCX extended network to route traffic optimally through the cloud-side first-hop gateway instead of being routed through the source environment router. This helps you avoid a hairpin or trombone effect. Policy routes will allow control over which traffic is routed locally using the cloud gateway versus traffic that goes out through the source gateway.

Mobility groups and integration with VMware vRealize Network Insight (vRNI)

Mobility groups enable you to structure migration waves based on business requirements. You can assemble one or more VMs into logical sets for execution and monitoring of migrations as a group. When combined with the vRealize Network Insight integration (available as a separate license), mobility groups give you the flexibility to manage migrations for sets of VMs by application, network, pod or other aspects of your environment.

Traffic engineering features

VMware HCX provides settings for optimizing network traffic for HCX Interconnect and Network Extension services:

• TCP Flow Conditioning – This service dynamically adjusts the segment size during the TCP connection handshake between end points across the Network Extension, which optimizes the average packet size to reduce fragmentation and lower the overall packet rate.
• Application Path Resiliency – This service creates multiple tunnel flows for both Interconnect and Network Extension traffic, so they can follow multiple paths across the network infrastructure from the source to the destination data centers. The service then intelligently forwards traffic over the optimal path and dynamically switches between tunnels depending on traffic conditions.

VMware HCX  in VMware Cloud on AWS helps accelerate your organization’s cloud adoption by facilitating workload mobility across a variety of destinations running a Software-Defined Data Center stack. Now you can eliminate all downtime associated with those large scale migrations, plan migration waves and fine tune mobility traffic in an optimally planned way.

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!