VMware HCX 4.2

HCX analyzes migration metrics and provides an estimate of the time required to complete the relocation phase of every configured vMotion, as well as the time required to complete the transfer phase of every RAV migration. For each virtual machine migration, the estimate is shown in the progress bar displayed on both the Migration Tracking and Migration Management pages while the transfer is underway.

VMware HCX 4.2.0 is a minor release that provides new features, UI enhancements, and fixed issues.

 

Interoperability Enhancements ​

    HCX Enterprise feature set is now GA with these environments:

•  Azure VMware Solution
•  ​Google Cloud VMware Engine
•  Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

​Consult with your cloud provider for feature availability and requirements.

User Interface Enhancements

Migration Management – The Migration Management page now displays 50 VM migrations per page load. Previously, pages displayed only 15 VM migrations.

Migration Enhancements

Real-time Estimation of vMotion and Replication Assisted vMotion Migration – HCX analyzes migration metrics and provides an estimation of the time required to complete the relocation phase for every configured vMotion, and the time required to complete the transfer phase for every RAV migration. The estimate is shown in the progress bar displayed on the Migration Tracking and Migration Management pages for each virtual machine migration while the transfer is in underway.

Predictive Estimation of Replication Assisted vMotion (RAV) Migrations – For RAV migrations in Draft state, HCX uses machine learning to get an estimate of the time that may be required to complete the migration. The estimate is shown in the progress bar displayed on the Migration Management page. Predictive estimation is available for Early Adoption (EA) with both RAV and Bulk migration.

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

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!

HCX Overview

HCX is the swiss army knife of workload mobility. It abstracts and removes the boundaries of underlying infrastructure focusing on the workloads. A HCX vMotion, for example, requires no direct connectivity to ESXi hosts in either direction compared to a vSphere vMotion. All HCX vMotion traffic gets managed through the HCX vMotion Proxy at each location. The HCX vMotion Proxy resembles an ESXi host within the vCenter Server inventory. It’s deployed at the data center level by default, no intervention is necessary. One thing to mention is the HCX vMotion proxy gets added to the vCenter Server host count by default. The HCX team is aware and will be changing this in the future, but this has no impact on your vSphere licensing.

Another boundary HCX removes is it supports several versions of vSphere going back to vSphere 5.0 to the most current release of vSphere 6.7 Update 1. This provides flexibility in moving workloads across vSphere versions, on-premises locations, and vSphere SSO domains. For on-premises to on-premises migrations, a NSX Hybrid Connect license is required per HCX site pairing. We will cover site pairing in the configuration blog post. Migrating workloads from on-premises to VMC does not require a separate HCX license. By default when deploying a VMC SDDC HCX is included as an add-on and is enabled by default. From the VMC add-ons tab, all that is required is clicking open Hybrid Cloud Extension and then deploy HCX. The deployment of HCX is completely automated within the VMC SDDC.

In order to start migrating workloads, network connectivity between the source and destination needs to be in place. The good news is it’s all built-in to the product. HCX has WAN optimization, deduplication, and compression to increase efficiency while decreasing the time it takes to perform migrations. The minimum network bandwidth required to migrate workloads with HCX is 100 Mbps. HCX can leverage your internet connection as well as direct connect. The established network tunnel is secured using suite B encryption. The on-premises workloads being migrated with no downtime will need to reside on a vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS). It also supports a 3rd party switch in the Nexus 1000v. Cold and bulk HCX migration types are currently the only two options which support the use of a vSphere standard switch but implies downtime for the workload (The HCX team is working on adding support for the vSphere standard switch for other migration types). To minimize migration downtime, HCX has a single click option to extend on-premises networks (L2 stretch) to other on-premises sites or VMware Cloud on AWS. Once the workloads have been migrated there is also an option to migrate the extended network, if you choose. Other built-in functionality includes:

•     Native scheduler for migrations
•     Per-VM EVC
•     Upgrade VM Tools / Compatibility (hardware)
•     Retain mac address
•     Remove snapshots
•     Force Unmount ISO images
•     Bi-directional migration support

HCX provides enhanced functionality on top of the built-in vSphere VM mobility options. Customers can now use HCX to migrate workloads seamlessly from on-premises to other paired on-premises sites (multisite) and VMware Cloud on AWS. Workload mobility can also help with hardware refreshes as well as upgrading from unsupported vSphere 5.x version. The next post will cover the different migration options available within HCX, followed by how to setup and configure the product.

I will share the update information shortly. I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!