HCX

Quick Tip – How to clear all Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) Migrations in the vSphere UI

10/11/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

During the development of my Cloud Motion with vSphere Replication automation script for Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX), I extensively used the HCX vSphere UI for testing and debugging purposes.

Under the Migration view, you can see all active and completed migrations, including any failed migration attempts. In my particular environment, there had been a few hundred migrations and with my additional testing, that added quite a few more. Although you can filter by name or sort by the type of operation, it was still not very convenient for me while developing the script. I wanted a quick way to view the details after calling the HCX APIs and by the time I jumped to the UI, I would have missed a few of those updates.

In speaking with one of the HCX Engineers, I found out that you could simply drop all migration history from the internal database (this would remove all the history for past migrations including failures). In general, I do not see this being something customers would have a need for in Production, as you would want to keep all the history for auditing or debugging purposes. This is probably more for demo or testing purposes and below are the instructions on how to clear all migrations from your HCX Manager.

Automating new Cloud Motion with vSphere Replication using Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) API

09/25/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Cloud Motion with vSphere Replication is the newest migration type that has been added to the Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) solution, which was also demonstrated during the VMworld US 2018 keynote (watch here). Unlike the traditional Bulk Migration, which also uses vSphere Replication to perform the initial replication, Cloud Motion with VR does not incur any downtime during the VM switch over. This is possible with our most beloved vSphere feature, vMotion!

With Bulk Migration, the VM on the source vCenter Server must be shutdown before the newly replicated VM on the destination vCenter Server can be powered on or else a network conflict will occur. Using Cloud Motion with VR, the VM is simply vMotion'ed from the source vCenter Server to the destination vCenter Server and because the VM's storage has already been replicated, the only thing that needs to transfer is the memory state of the VM.

All three HCX Migration Types can be scheduled from the HCX UI using the vSphere Client or automated using the HCX API. The latter option is definitely ideal for customers with large number of migrations but it can also help with smaller migrations as it reduces the amount of user input required when using the UI and ultimately, this reduces user errors.

To help demonstrate the HCX Migration APIs, I have updated my VMware HCX PowerShell Module to include the following two new functions:

New-HcxMigration
Get-HcxMigration

Automating Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) Manager OVA deployment

09/24/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Feedback on my recent Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) Automation articles has been very positive, thanks to those who have reached out. One area that I have not had a chance to spend much time on which a few of you have pinged me about is the automating the actual deployment of the HCX Manager, which is provided to customers as an OVA image. In this article, I have created a basic PowerCLI script called deploy_hcx_manager_ova.ps1 that demonstrates using the Import-VApp and Get-OVFConfiguration cmdlets to import the OVA along with specifying the required OVF properties. The script will also wait for the HCX Manager to be ready by checking the VAMI URL located at https://[HCX-MANAGER]:9443

Lastly, for those of you who are new to HCX or would like a step by step walk through of setting up HCX, Emad Younis just kicked off a new blog series on learning about HCX, which I highly recommend folks check out here.

Here are the instructions on using the PowerCLI script to automate the HCX OVA deployment:

Step 1 - Download the latest HCX Manager OVA from HCX Cloud (you will need to login with your cloudadmin credentials)

Step 2- Download the PowerCLI HCX deployment script here.

Step 3 - Edit the script with your HCX configuration and deployment details

Step 4 - You will need to connect to your vCenter Server by using the Connect-VIServer cmdlet and then run the deployment script using the following command:

.\deploy_hcx_manager.ova.ps1

Once the deployment is successful, you can now open a browser to https://[HCX-MANAGER]:9443 and login using the admin credentials that you had specified in the script. I also plan to do a follow-up to this blog post on automating the initial configuration using the HCX VAMI APIs, so stay tuned.

Create vCenter Alarms for monitoring HCX migration events

09/20/2018 by William Lam 1 Comment

With the Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) solution, customers can migrate workloads immediately or have them scheduled at a later date and time of their choosing. Most customers will most likely not migrate all their workloads at once, but instead migrate them in different phases or waves based on their own internal schedules. The HCX "Migration" tab in the vSphere Client is a great place to get an overview of all the active, failed, planned and completed migrations and you can get additional details for each migration such status, percentage, amount of data transferred, etc.

Having said that, you probably also do not want to just sit there and constantly watch for progress, especially if something fails. The good news is that HCX already includes some default vCenter Alarms that are generated when a migration fails. There is one for vMotion/Cloud Motion, Cold Migration as well as Bulk Migration and currently these alarms only trigger a UI indication that something is wrong using the red critical icon on the VM in question.

Since these are vCenter Alarms, you also have the option of adding additional actions such as sending an email alert to a particular user or group, an SNMP trap which can then be monitored by your operations team or even run a command within the vCenter Server. Simply updating the default alarm which is defined at the vCenter Server level, you can proactively get notified when an HCX migration fails without having to constantly watch the UI. You may have also noticed the alarm definition is using a numeric ID which is highlighted in the screenshot above. This maybe useful if you wish to leave the default alarms alone and create a brand new alarm, you just need to use those IDs.

Another useful scenario to consider is getting notifications for a successful migration which can then help with transitioning users to the new VM running on VMC or even trigger automated VM and application verification before end users are even notified. Along these similar lines, you can imagine another scenario to consider is with using Bulk Migration and/or Cloud Motion with vSphere Replication. Both methods initially start off by replicating the VM's data from the source vCenter Server to the destination vCenter Server and then either a Cold Migration or vMotion is performed based on the configured scheduled.

Getting started with the Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) APIs

09/18/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) is the de facto VMware solution when it comes to Enterprise scale workload migration whether that is from onPrem to onPrem or from onPrem to Cloud, including our VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) offering. In fact, one of the most popular use cases for HCX right now is datacenter evacuation/consolidation and customers are migrating their workloads to VMC because they want to get out of the business of running datacenters and get back to running their core business. This is especially attractive for customers wanting to expand to new markets without requiring the need of new datacenters. This makes a ton of sense, especially when you go beyond the initial CapEx, its the on-going OpEx costs that folks may not always be thinking about immediately and being able to easily scale up or down is not always possible for most onPrem environments.

HCX already provides a rich UI interface within the vSphere Client for scheduling migrations including the new Cloud Motion with vSphere Replication feature which was announced at VMworld US 2018.

However, it should come as no surprise that our customers are also interested in Automation, especially as it can help expedite migrations and remove potential user error, especially around mapping the destination networks which can be quite daunting for a large number of migrations. The good news is that HCX provides a Restful API that allows customers to automate all aspects of HCX including the HCX VAMI UI for initial configuration as well as consuming the HCX services which are exposed in the vSphere UI.

Getting started with Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) on VMware Cloud on AWS

12/12/2017 by William Lam 8 Comments

I had been hearing a lot of cool things about VMware's Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) but never tried the solution myself nor had a good understanding of what it actually provided. With the recently announced Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMWonAWS) offering being available, I thought this was a great way to get hands on with HCX and take advantage of my VMWonAWS infrastructure. Having only spent a couple of days with the solution, I can see why customers are excited for HCX and the new offering on VMWonAWS makes it super easy to consume. I also recently learned that HCX is now free for all VMWonAWS customers and you can easily moving VMs to/from your onPrem environment!

There are a number of impressive capabilities that HCX offers, but two that really stood out to me which I thought was quite unique and interesting compared to other VM-based "migration" options. The first is that HCX can perform live VM migrations (vMotion) or replicated migrations (vSphere Replication) which includes scheduled switch over across different versions of vSphere (vSphere 5.x to/from vSphere 6.x). This is great for customers who may not be able to upgrade their underlying vSphere environment to 6.0 or later and take advantage of things like Cross vCenter vMotion feature which only supports VM migration between vSphere 6.0u3 to/from 6.x.

The second capability is that HCX can abstract and protect the underlying ESXi hosts by not requiring direct connectivity between the source and destination ESXi hosts. Traditionally, for vMotion and vSphere Replication traffic, you either had to stretch the VLAN or ensure the VMkernel interface was routable so that it can communicate with the destination ESXi hosts for data transfers. This was not always possible and adds additional networking requirements which can be challenging to implement depending on how your network infrastructure is configured. The way HCX solves this problem is by using a special HCX Cloud Gateway which securely proxy vMotion and vSphere Replication traffic from the on-premises environment out to the respective HCX Cloud Gateway Peer which then gets transfered to destination vSphere environment. Below is a diagram to help illustrate this:

Note: HCX also supports WAN optimization (compression and de-duplication) out of the box, which the diagram includes as that is what I had deployed in my env. This is an optional virtual appliance that can be deployed at each location ensuring efficient data transfer between the source and destination vSphere environments.

While going through and getting HCX configured on both my VMWonAWS and onPrem environment, I had ran into a few minor gotchas and to help others avoid some of the issues I had ran into, I figure I would outline the process and include some additional tips that can be help.