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Announcing Availability of Enhanced VMware HCX Capabilities in VMware Cloud on AWS

Great news for any business that needs to rapidly migrate workloads to the cloud. With the latest release of VMware HCX- R145, a raft of new enhanced features are now a part of VMware Cloud on AWS. You can now perform large scale live migrations, plan migration waves and fine-tune mobility traffic seamlessly.

 

In my recent interactions with customers at VMworld 2020 and various Technical Advisory Boards, I have heard resounding feedback on how customers are struggling to meet the demands of remote working and learning. Existing infrastructure is under huge strain. Across healthcare, finance, public sector and education, customers are being challenged to provide a digital foundation for an unpredictable world – whether it is to support the development of vaccines, provide telemedicine capabilities, run essential services to support the economy or train the bright young minds of tomorrow.

The year 2020 has confronted us all and pushed boundaries in ways that we didn’t even think were possible. VMware is here to help support our customers in these difficult times, providing support to accelerate modernization and digitization journeys with minimal disruption to their business – so they can rapidly expand to meet new and growing demands from users.

You have known, loved and used VMware HCX for expanding into VMware Cloud on AWS in the past – for seamlessly migrating your workloads and rebalancing them between your on-premises datacenters and the cloud, or between different public clouds. The good news is, you’ll be able to do this and a lot more starting November 2020 with our latest release- R145!

I am excited to announce that select enhanced HCX features are now a part of VMware Cloud on AWS. It means you can now perform large scale live migrations into the cloud, plan, schedule migration waves, and fine-tune mobility traffic with ease.

Christmas has clearly come early this year! 😊


Source: The Lighter Side Of The Cloud

 

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.

For more details, refer to the blog announcement. Also see the config max tool for the maximum RAV migrations supported with the latest HCX release.

 

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.

For more details, refer to the blog announcement.

 

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.

For more details, refer to the blog announcement.

 

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.

For more details on these features, refer to the blog announcement.

To wrap up

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. All you need to do is upgrade to the latest VMware HCX release!

 

Learn how to enable these features in VMware Cloud on AWS in the HCX User Guide.

Want to learn more?

 

 

 

Anika Suri

Anika Suri is a Product Line Manager at VMware, where she is responsible for driving adoption of HCX with public Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google…

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