After spending a bit of time tidying up cables in my rack, I figured I’d take the opportunity to write about my current setup. Here it is in all its glory: Not the greatest picture. From top to bottom: Here’s a diagram of how it’s all connected together. Not in the diagram is a UniFi … Read more
Whilst HCX is a perfectly suitable to migrate most workloads, there are some which require careful consideration and planning such as SQL Clusters, Oracle (or other database servers), load balancers, and even Active Directory Domain Controllers. Domain Controllers definitely fall into the category of requiring extra consideration before migrating them with HCX. Whilst it is … Read more
I see quite a bit of confusion about this internally and with customers, so I figured I would write a quick blog post on the subject. Starting with HCX 4.9, you are able to active HCX Enterprise services using VCF Solution Licensing. To save you a little bit of reading, here is the TL;DR: If … Read more
HC 4.10 has just been released and with it come a whole host of excellent new features. You can read the release notes here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-HCX/4.10/rn/vmware-hcx-410-release-notes/index.html In this post, I want to concentrate on what will be welcome to customers who operate their own private datacentres and have no use for encryption. Historically, the traffic between … Read more
HCX 4.9 brought some licensing changes as well as offline/dark site support. Whilst it is still possible to upgrade using the well-known approach in the UI, you are now able to download the upgrade bundles. Whilst this is the only option for Local sites, it’s possible to use it for Connected sites, which might be … Read more
HCX has historically always required internet access for activation and updates. Even after activation, it requires constant access as otherwise the software goes into a deactivated state. Whilst an internet proxy can be used for this access, there are customers out there who have been asking for years to be able to deploy it into … Read more
With the release of HCX 4.8 comes in my opinion one of the biggest new features released since Network Extension High Availability went IA in 4.3. In previous versions for any given Compute Profile pair, while it was possible to deploy more than one Service Mesh, only the first one would be used. I previously … Read more
I’ve seen a few cases in the field where a HCX Manager has been deployed onto the same network which is use by workload VMs, and to make matters worse, the network is in scope for being stretched and then moved to the target environment. The issue here is that when you come to unstretch … Read more
Following on from my previous post on HCX+, I’ll now cover the next stage in the process. Apologies for the delay, I’ve been enjoying some time off work! As a very quick recap, so far both our on-prem and SDDC HSM appliances have been deployed and activated. If we use the UI to try and … Read more
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