A quick look at HCX+ part 1 – onboarding your SDDC and on-prem sites

HCX+ Initial Availability has recently launched and it is part of Project Northstar, which is essentially SaaS delivered multi-cloud Networking and Security. Rather than paraphrasing what HCX Product Manager Gabe Rosas has already written about HCX+, I’ll quote his words here: On a foundation of true & tested workload VMware mobility technologies, HCX+ provides a … Read more

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

Automating the HCX OSAM Sentinel Agent install via SCCM

A question came up in an internal Slack channel whether VMware had written a guide on installing the OS Assisted Migration (OSAM) Sentinel Agent via Microsoft’s SCCM (now called Endpoint Manager) software. I don’t think such a guide exists, so I thought ‘how hard can it be?’ and decided to give it a go. The … Read more

Testing HCX Network Extension HA

The HCX team have just released version 4.3 and there are some really nice new features. Go ahead and check out the release notes here. One such addition is High Availability for HCX Network Extension and it is something which every customer I have worked has requested or asked about. As such it is most … Read more