VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX)

Extend Your On-Premises Environments to the Cloud using HCX.

VMware HCX is an application mobility platform that is designed for simplifying application migration, workload rebalancing, and business continuity across data centers and clouds. You can schedule and migrate thousands of vSphere virtual machines within and across data centers without requiring a reboot.

Below are the few HCX Use Cases.

· Application migration

· Change platforms or upgrade vSphere versions.

· Workload rebalancing

· Business continuity and protection

Let's Discuss HCX Components :

In the HCX site-to-site architecture, there is notion of an HCX source and an HCX destination environment. Depending on the environment, there is a specific HCX installer: HCX Connector or HCX Cloud.

 HCX Connector Appliance: HCX connector is always deployed as the source.

 HCX Cloud Appliance: HCX cloud is generally deployed at destination. the cloud Provider deploy

 HCX cloud but in can be use as the source in cloud-cloud deployment.

HCX-Interconnect Appliance: HCX interconnect appliance deploy on both source and destination side, and it will create tunnel to perform replication and vMotion-based migration.

HCX Network Extension: HCX network appliance is also deploy on both side source and destination. It provides layer 2 connectivity between sites .NE Appliance provide capability to extend your layer2 network so you can use same IP and MAC address during virtual machine migration.

HCX WAN Optimization Appliance: HCX WAN Optimization improves performance characteristics of the private lines or Internet paths by applying WAN optimization techniques like the data de-duplication and line conditioning.

HCX OS Assisted migration: Using HCX OS Assisted migration (OSAM) service we can migrate non -vSphere virtual machine from On-Prem to Cloud. OSAM service has 2 components. HCX Sentinel Gateway on source side and HCX Sentinel Receiver on destination side

HCX Sentinel software that is installed on each virtual machine to be migrated, a Sentinel Gateway (SGW) appliance for connecting and forwarding guest workloads in the source environment, and a Sentinel Data Receiver (SDR) in the destination environment.

Installation of HCX:

Deployment of VMware HCX appliance using OVA is like other OVA deployments.

1- First you have download the HCX Could OVA from VMware Portal.

2-   Once OVA downloaded in your local machine. Login to vCenter using administrator@vsphere.local account.

3-   Go to the cluster and right click ,you will get option Deploy OVF Template.

4-   Once you will Click on Deploy OVF template, you will get two options.

4.1-Using URL (if you have internet connectivity from vCenter and required port is open you can provide direct link from the place you can downloaded HCX cloud OVA).

4.2- In second option you can downloaded offline and copy to your local machine.

5- In My case if have downloaded OVA to my local machine and will choose local machine option and upload OVA file, Click Next .

6-Provide virtual machine name and Click Next.

7.On next screen choose compute resource where you want to deploy HCX appliance. Click Next.

8. Review the initial deployment details of the HCX appliance and NEXT.

9. Accept the EULA for the deployment.

10. Select the datastore where you want to deploy the VMware HCX appliances.

11.Select network port group to connect the VMware HCX appliance.

12. In this step Customize template make sure provide all the details are correct. Here you need to ensure you populate the credentials you want to configure, network address, DNS lookups, static routes, enable SSH and other options.

13. Review all the information and complete the installation.

Setup HCX Appliance configuration: 

1.Once you deploy the VMware HCX appliance, you will need to go through the VMware HCX appliances configuration. Power on the appliance and allow it to boot up and services to start.

2.Once all the services will up, Login to HCX cloud appliance using url with port 9443 <https://hcx FQDN :9443)

3.Enter License Key, here you can provide NSX-T license Key also and click on Activate.

4.Once HCX will activate it will move to Next screen and ask for Datacenter Location.

5.Click on Continue, after providing Datacenter location.

6.In Next screen it will auto-populate system name, Verify System name and Click Continue.

7. Select the instance type of your VMware HCX appliances,If you want to configure with Cloud Director you can choose Cloud Director. In my case I am going to configure with vSphere.

8.Provide vCenter server details and NSX manager to connect with HCX appliance.

9. Connect VMware HCX to your vCenter Server and NSX Manager appliances. Here you enter the URL for vCenter Server and the NSX Manager along with credentials to connect.

10. Accept The certificate warning .

11. Next you have to Configure SSO. If you configuration screen is logout by any reason, you can again login to HCX url using port 0443. E.g <https://hcx-cloud fqdn:9443 )

12. Go to configuration page click on SSO from left side and provide SSO/PSC details.

13. You can also configure public url, Go to Configuration and click on public url in my case as I am using lab environment so going to use local url only.

14.Once you will configure everything in HCX-Cloud appliance you can restart the appliance.

15.Last once the appliance will come up after reboot Login to HCX-Cloud Appliance using FQDN or IP but without port 9443. E.g https://hcx-fqdn or ip.

16. You have to follow the same steps and Deploy HCX connector on other location or Datacenter.


Hope My Blog will help you to deploy HCX appliance in your  environment.

In Next Section, we will take look how to configure Site pairing, Compute profile and Deploy Interconnect appliance.