In last post of this series we performed a reverse migration and brought a VM back to on-prem from cloud. Now we have tested all migration method and have basic understanding of how they work, lets move forward to explore Disaster Recovery capabilities provided by HCX.

If you are not following along this series, then I recommend reading earlier posts of this series from below links:

1: Introduction to HCX

2: HCX Enterprise Deployment & Configuration

3: HCX Cloud Deployment & Configuration

4: HCX Site Pairing

5: Configuring Interconnect Networks

6: Deploying Fleet Appliances

7: HCX Migration Methods

8: Testing HCX Cross Cloud Migration

9: Testing HCX Bulk Migration

10: HCX Reverse Migration

About HCX Disaster Recovery

HCX Disaster Recovery is a service intended to protect virtual workloads managed by VMware vSphere that are either deployed in a private or a public cloud.

HCX DR offers following benefits:

• Simple and easy to use management platform that allows secure (enterprise to cloud and cloud to cloud) asynchronous replication and recovery of virtual machines.

… Read More

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:

1: Introduction to HCX

2: HCX Enterprise Deployment & Configuration

3: HCX Cloud Deployment & Configuration

4: HCX Site Pairing

5: Configuring Interconnect Networks

6: Deploying Fleet Appliances

7: HCX Migration Methods

8: Testing HCX Cross Cloud Migration

9: Testing HCX Bulk 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.… Read More

In last post we tested the Cross-Cloud vMotion feature of HCX. In this post we will be testing the bulk migration feature.

If you are not following along this series, then I recommend reading earlier posts of this series from below links:

1: Introduction to HCX

2: HCX Enterprise Deployment & Configuration

3: HCX Cloud Deployment & Configuration

4: HCX Site Pairing

5: Configuring Interconnect Networks

6: Deploying Fleet Appliances

7: HCX Migration Methods

8: Testing HCX Cross Cloud Migration

To trigger bulk migration feature, click on Migrate Virtual machines option.

Fill in the default values for container selection etc and select migration type as bulk migration.

Click on (Schedule Failover) to specify the switchover time. 

Select the start and end time.

Select the VM’s which will be migrated to cloud. You can change migration type for individual VM’s. For e.g you can choose few VM’s for bulk migration and few for vMotion or Cold migration. … Read More

In last post of this series we discussed about various migration methods that are available with HCX. In this post we will be testing the cross-cloud migration method in lab. 

If you are not following along this series, then I recommend reading earlier posts of this series from below links:

1: Introduction to HCX

2: HCX Enterprise Deployment & Configuration

3: HCX Cloud Deployment & Configuration

4: HCX Site Pairing

5: Configuring Interconnect Networks

6: Deploying Fleet Appliances

7: HCX Migration Methods

To configure cross-cloud migration for VM’s, login to vCenter Web Client and click on HCX plugin from home page and go to Migration tab. Click on Migrate Virtual machines.

The selections made default options are automatically applied on all VM’s selected for migration. For e.g migrated vm’s will be sitting in which compute cluster/datastore/folder etc. You can override this at per vm level as well. 

There are various other options available as well such as Upgrade virtual hardware, Upgrade VMware tools etc.… Read More

In last post of this series we did the fleet configuration so that we can deploy the fleet appliances. In this post we will discuss about the fleet appliances and will deploy them.

If you are not following along this series, then I recommend reading earlier posts of this series from below links:

1: Introduction to HCX

2: HCX Enterprise Deployment & Configuration

3: HCX Cloud Deployment & Configuration

4: HCX Site Pairing

5: Configuring Interconnect Networks

There are 3 appliances that you can deploy in your HCX environment:

Cloud Gateway (CGW): The CGW appliance is responsible for creating encrypted tunnel between on-premise and HCX-Cloud for vMotion and Replication traffic. CGW deployment is kicked from on-prem and its deployed as virtual machine in both on-prem and cloud side.

CGW constitutes the migration path for vMotion and replication traffic and it is done via establishing a secure connection between the 2 CGW vm’s deployed in on-prem and cloud side respectively.… Read More

In last post of this series we paired HCX Enterprise with the HCX Cloud appliance. Now the next task is to deploy the fleet appliances, but before doing any deployment we have to configure the networks for interconnects i.e fleet configuration.

If you are not following along this series, then I recommend reading earlier posts of this series from below links:

1: Introduction to HCX

2: HCX Enterprise Deployment & Configuration

3: HCX Cloud Deployment & Configuration

4: HCX Site Pairing

Basically we are defining a pool of IP’s which interconnect appliances will use when we start deploying them. High level steps of fleet config are summarized as below.

Login to hcx cloud using the public url (https://hcx-cloud-public-fqdn) and navigate to Administration > Deployment Containers.

Deployment containers dictates where your fleet appliances will be sitting post deployment. Click on Add button to specify a new container.

Provide a name for the container and select the vCenter server with which your HCX-Cloud appliance is registered.… Read More

In this post we will be pairing the HCX-Enterprise appliance with the HCX-Cloud to start consuming HCX features.

If you are not following along this series, then I recommend reading earlier posts of this series from below links:

1: Introduction to HCX

2: HCX Enterprise Deployment & Configuration

3: HCX Cloud Deployment & Configuration

Site pairing task is straight forward and it should compelte without any issue if all your configuration is correct. However In my lab I was getting an error “untrusted ssl connection” when trying to do site pairing.

If you are testing HCX in your lab environment, then for fixing this issue please read this article

 To pair HCX-Enterprise with HCX-Cloud, login to your on-premise vCenter Web Client and click on HCX plugin and go to Site Pairings tab.

Click on Register new connection.

Specify the public url of your HCX cloud appliance (we configured this while deploying the hcx cloud)

Specify the vCenter administrator user name.… Read More

In last post of HCX series, we deployed HCX Cloud appliance and performed basic configuration. The next step was to pair the HCX Enterprise appliance to the HCX Cloud so that we can start consuming HCX features. 

When I tried pairing the on-prem HCX to HCX Cloud, I was getting ssl connection error and site pairing task was failing.

I was pretty sure that this is happening because of untrusted ssl certs in my lab and I was thinking that may be I need to replace the self-signed certs with the CA signed certs. 

I quickly checked on this error with one of our staff engineer from hybridity team and he helped me with actual steps for fixing this issue. These are the high level steps you need to perform when you face this issue.

1: Generate Private and Public cert file on HCX Cloud appliance.

… Read More