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

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

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

Deploying NSX part 2 – Cluster deployment, Host preparation and Logical Switch setup

Now that the NSX manager appliance is installed and set up with vCenter, it’s time to deploy the control cluster and prepare the hosts. But before we do this, we need to define IP Pools for the Controller cluster and hosts to use. Head over to Groups and Tags from within the Networking and Security … Read more

Building a 2 node vSAN cluster with vSAN witness appliance

Today I’m going to talk about setting up a 2 node vSAN witness homelab. Homelabs are important for anyone wanting to progress their knowledge, although some hardware can be quite expensive, especially if you want to work with multiple hosts! Nested environments are quite popular but I think nothing beats having physical hardware to play … Read more