In last post of this series we learnt about Bulk Migration feature of HCX. In this post we will learn about HCX Reverse Migration.
Reverse migration provides you the ability to migrate VMs back from your cloud infrastructure to your on-premises environment using the HCX migration methods (No downtime/Cold migration/Bulk migration).
If you are not following along this series, then I recommend reading earlier posts of this series from below links:
2: HCX Enterprise Deployment & Configuration
3: HCX Cloud Deployment & Configuration
5: Configuring Interconnect Networks
8: Testing HCX Cross Cloud Migration
Reverse migration use cases
There are 2 or 3 use cases which I can think as of now for Reverse migration.
1: You have transferred a VM to cloud and later found that vm is not suitable to run in cloud environment and you are facing serious performance issues. There can be many factor behind not getting the performance you expected and in this case you want to bring the transferred vm back to on-prem because it was performing well there.
2: You are trying another cloud provider and want to bring back your cloud vm’s from your current cloud infrastructure back to on-prem and then migrate them back to the new cloud provider.
3: Vendor lock in: Few applications are tied with the mac address and its possible that you may not get the same mac address for a vm post migrating it to cloud. May be that mac address is already in use or the cloud side infrastructure don’t support the mac address scheme which you have in on-prem.
In this case if you have migrated any such vm to cloud and later found that you can;t get the same mac address in cloud, you need to bring it back in your on-prem environment.
There can be other use cases as well but since I am new to HCX, I am not sure what they can be.
Lets jump into lab and test this feature.
From HCX dashboard click on Migrate Virtual Machines and in the wizard that pops up select ‘Reverse Migration’
Specify the default options like placement container and type of migration etc.
Select the vm’s from the list which will be brought back from cloud. You can override the migration method for individual vm’s. You can migrate some via vMotion and others via bulk migration or cold migration method.
Since I am running on a trial license, I only selected 2 VM’s for this excercise. Trial license limits you to just 4 migrations ;).
Once you hit finish migration process starts.
Initially migration will be queued up.
You can see the direction of migration. Its towards the on-prem side.
VM details will be collected by HCX.
Since I selected vMotion method, HCX is creating a shadow VM (just like vSphere regular vMotion)
And finally migration will kick in.
Wait for some time for migration to complete. This totally depends upon size of your vm and the network bandwidth you have.
And that’s it for this post.
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