HCX

Whats New in HCX 4.0

Manish Jha

VMware HCX 4.0 is all set to be released today. HCX 4.0 is a major release that introduces new functionality and enhancements.

In this post, I will be explaining these feature additions. The new feature sets can be widely categorized as follows:

  • Migration Enhancements
  • Network Extension Enhancements
  • Interconnect Enhancements

Let’s discuss this one by one.

Migration Enhancements

1: Migration Event Details: When VM migration is in progress, the HCX migration platform captures high-level status for the major phases like transfer, continuous replication, and switchover, and the status reported in the UI is always shown as “Transfer in Progress,”  “Switchover in Progress,” etc.

The actual details about “what state the migration is in right now” and “how long it has been in that state” are hidden from the end user. Also, the platform does not report the exact reason if the migration fails or why the migration is taking a long time to move to the next state.… Read More

Configure VCD in HCX via API

Manish Jha

In my last post, I documented the HCX installation workflow for VCD based clouds. In this post, I am going to show how to do the same via API. 

Once HCX Cloud Manager has been deployed and boots up, you can make use of the below API to integrate VCD into HCX. 

1: Import VCD Certificate

Response Output

2: Configure VCD

… Read More

HCX Integration With VMware Cloud Director 10x

Manish Jha

This blog post provides an overview of the HCX installation workflow for VMware Cloud Director based Clouds.

The below diagram taken from VMware official docs shows the high-level architecture of HCX architecture for VCD based clouds.

HCX Cloud System & Network Requirements

Before starting HCX Cloud installation, please ensure that you’ve met all the System and Network Port/Protocol requirements. These are documented Here

Firewall Requirements

  • The site’s WAN firewall will need to allow inbound HTTPS connections destined for the HCX Cloud. HCX Cloud will make outbound HTTPS requests.
  • The HCX Cloud site firewall also needs to allow inbound UDP-500 and UDP-4500 connections destined for the HCX appliances.
  • All other flows allow HCX to integrate with VMware SDDC components, typically these are not firewalled within the datacenter

The below diagram shows various ports that must be allowed in the firewall for a successful HCX cloud deployment in the destination environment.

VMware Cloud Director Pre-requisites

Make sure the following is already configured in VCD:

1: VCD Public Address is set and load balancer cert is imported (for multi-cell deployment)

2: RabbitMQ is installed and configured into VCD. … Read More

Upgrading HCX Interconnect Appliances via API

Manish Jha

HCX Interconnect appliances are deployed from the OVA’s which are included in the HCX Manager appliance. When HCX Manager is upgraded to a newer version, it contains the corresponding upgrade bits for IX appliances which are used to upgrade the IX components. 

There is a GET /appliances API call which when fired, looks for newer versions of OVA.  Once the newer version of ova is found, its version is then compared with the version of the deployed appliance. If both versions are the same, no action is taken. However, if the deployed version is lower than the newly discovered version, info about the upgrade is returned in the API call response. 

Below are the API calls which we need to execute for upgrading IX appliances.

Step 1: Obtain Auth Token

… Read More

Upgrading HCX Manager via API

Manish Jha

While working on an HCX related request from one of the hyperscaler, I came across an interesting ask where hyperscaler is looking for automating HCX upgrade via API. 

On checking HCX’s official API guide and swagger documentation and did not found any API to upgrade the HCX Manager appliance. The only available API’s are to upgrade HCX interconnect appliances.

After searching through internal documentation for an hour, I did not found any concrete info and I decided to explore the Network Inspect option in a browser which exposes APIs for any operation you trigger from UI. 

In this post, I am going to demonstrate what are the API calls needed for a successful HCX Manager upgrade. 

Disclaimer: HCX Manager upgrade APIs are not yet supported officially and will be shipped with the upcoming release of HCX.

Step 1: Check HCX Appliance Current Upgrade Status

Although this step is optional, I would recommend verifying the current upgrade status to ensure you do not accidentally attempt to upgrade an appliance that is already on the target version. … Read More

HCX Service Mesh Operations via API

Manish Jha

Before deploying Service Mesh, we need to create Compute & Network Profiles in both source & destination HCX environment. The order of Service Mesh deployment is as follows:

  1. Create Network Profiles in source & destination HCX.
  2. Create Compute Profiles in source & destination HCX.
  3. Trigger Service Mesh deployment from on-prem (source) site.

In this post I will demonstrate HCX Service Mesh operations via API.

Some of the most common operation associated with service mesh can be:

  1. Create profiles (Network & Compute) and deploy service mesh.
  2. Update Network & Compute profiles to include/remove additional features.
  3. Delete Network & Compute profiles.
  4. Update Service Mesh to include/remove additional services.
  5. Delete Service Mesh. 

Let’s jump into lab and look at these operations in action.

Network Profile API

1: List Network Profiles: This API call list all the networks profiles that you have created to be used in service mesh. 

 

Note: Here objectId is the id of the various networks participating in network profiles

2: List Specific Network profile: This API call lists a specific network profile.… Read More

HCX Activation Key Management for Hyperscalers

Manish Jha

Disclaimer: This post is only intended for MSP & Hyperscalers only. Also below content is based on my learnings and I encourage reader of this post to cross verify things with VMware before executing/implementing anything. 

HCX is one of the key component in SDDC As a Service offering by hyperscalers (Google, Azure, CloudSimple, IBM, Oracle, Alibaba etc). HCX is consumed as SaaS offering in VMware SDDC’s on top of hyperscalers cloud. Automated deployment and configuration of HCX (cloud) is hyperscalers responsibility and this process becomes a bit complex when it comes to life-cycle management of HCX. 

One of the challenges with HCX is Activation key management. An activation key can have many states including:

1: Available: This is state of a freshly generated Activation key by a MSP. Keys that are in available state can be used to activate HCX appliances (Cloud/Connector).

MSP/Hyperscalers can generate activation keys (via API) to activate Tenant HCX-Cloud appliance.… Read More

HCX Mobility Groups

Manish Jha

VMware HCX is ultimate choice when it comes to migrating workloads to VMware SDDC running in cloud or a secondary site. Various migration techniques available with HCX makes life easy when it comes to planning migration for different kind of workloads. There are workloads which can incur some downtime while migration, on the other hand there are critical business applications which needs to be functional during entire duration of migration.

Current Challenges With Workload Migration

The most difficult part in any migration technology is Planning and Scheduling Migration Waves (which workloads should be migrated and when). Divergence of workloads (legacy, cloud native, microservices) have made datacenters more complex than ever. On top of that lack of clear and current documentation detailing the application landscape adds greater anxiety with every scheduled migration wave.

Architects spends a fair amount of time to understand application dependencies and correlation by conducting exhaustive interviews with application owners.… Read More

VMware HCX Replication Assisted vMotion

Manish Jha

Prior to Replication Assisted vMotion (RAV) feature, VMware HCX offered three distinct migration methodologies:

  • HCX Bulk Migration
  • HCX Cross-Cloud vMotion
  • HCX Cold Migration

I have explained about these methods in this blog post. Also working of these migration techniques are documented here and here.

Before jumping into what is Replication Assisted vMotion, let’s discuss about pros and cons of above mentioned techniques. 

  • Bulk migration is resilient over network latencies and also allows multiple VMs to migrated simultaneously, but VM’s do incur a small downtime during final switchover.
  • HCX VMotion migration on the other hand, keeps the application workloads live during entire migration window; but is sensitive to network latencies and jitter. Also we have limitation of 2 vMotion migration per ESXi host at a time.

RAV feature brings best of both these options in the form of cloud vMotion with vSphere Replication.

What is HCX Replication Assisted vMotion?

RAV migration is a new type of migration offering from HCX.… Read More

VMware HCX: Cloud to Cloud Migration

Manish Jha

Those who have worked on HCX, knows how easy it is to perform workload migrations from On-Prem datacenter to SDDC running in cloud. Bi-directional migration feature has helped customers to setup a true hybrid cloud infrastructure as app mobility was never so easy. To leverage HCX, your CSP will deploy HCX cloud on top of SDDC and provide you URL + Credentials, which you can feed into your on-prem HCX Connector appliance to get started with HCX. 

In this post I am going to demonstrate workload migration between two HCX Cloud instances. In a Multi-Cloud world, vendor lock-in is a thing of past and more and more customers are now using/evaluating services of more than one cloud provider.

HCX cloud-to-cloud migration will be helpful in putting brakes on CSP’s who are monopolizing their service offerings. Customers can now easily evacuate a given cloud and can seamlessly migrate to another cloud without any hassle.… Read More