Can you use HCX OSAM to migrate from Native Azure to vSphere?

HCX OS Assisted Migration (OSAM for short) is a VMware tool where VMs hosted on either KVM or Hyper-V or can be migrated into vSphere. It’s designed to work at scale and can do 50 concurrent migrations per Service Mesh and will scale up to four Service Meshes; allowing up to 200 total parallel migrations. … Read more

HCX Network Extension with LACP – quick update

LACP on ESXi is fairly common with some vendors that do their own networking between the Top of Rack switches and the hosts, such as Cisco UCS and HPE Synergy. This has been problematic as extending networks with this configuration has typically been unsupported. Up until recently, the HCX documentation has called out the following … Read more

My homelab – 2023 Update Part 1

Although I have previously documented my homelab, there have been some changes as well as a housemove. This is part 1 of my 2023 update. This is how it was around a week ago, and as you can see it’s a bit of a mess. The Lack ‘Rack’ was only tempoary and I’ve had it … Read more

VMware HCX – common misconceptions and unsupported configuration

This is a post covering some things which I regularly see in the field. I’ll endeavour to keep this updated as new releases come out. The below is currently correct (as far as I know) with HCX 4.6. Always refer to the HCX documentation for the source of truth. This is not an official VMware … Read more

Single HCX site installation supporting OSAM Migrations (HCX Consolidated Architecture)

HCX OS Assisted Migration is a migration method within HCX where we can move supported guest OS VMs from a Hyper-V or KVM environment. The process to do so is once you have a functioning Service Mesh, you download a Sentinel agent and then install it on the VMs in scope for migration. Shortly afterwards, … Read more

HCX Bulk Migration for Single vCenter Server Topologies

Part way through the HCX 4.5 release notes it mentions the above with the following note: “In HCX 4.5, HCX can be deployed within a single vCenter Server to enable the Bulk migration. This is useful for cluster-to-cluster migrations in environments where the vendor compatibility or other requirements for cluster-to-cluster vMotion cannot be satisfied“ This, … Read more

How VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery compares to VMware Site Recovery Manager

VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) is a relatively new product, certainly compared to Site Recovery Manager (SRM) which has been around since 2007; to put that into perspective, vSphere 5.0 didn’t go GA until 2011. The basic premise of the products are similar in that we configure protected sites, recovery sites, as well as folder … Read more

Configure BGP on a UDM SE v3.0.10 or later

Update 26/07/23 – if you are running 3.1.x then follow my updated post here: https://chrisdooks.com/2023/06/26/configure-bgp-on-a-unifi-dream-machine-udm-v3-1-x-or-later/ Update 23/07/23 – it seems UniFi are now bundling FRR into their UDM to support UniFI Site Magic – source. I’ll create a new blog post soon, essentially you just need to enable the BGP daemon in /etc/frr/daemons and then … Read more