Articles by Bilal Ahmed

Migrate VMs using #HCX #OSAM and #PowerCLI

April 4, 2022 Bilal Ahmed 0

Let’s talk about OSAM So “Operating System Assisted Migration”, can be used when you have Enterprise level HCX licensing. In the HCX Connector you have to download the OS agent which then you install onto the guest operating system: Once you have downloaded it locally, you can then copy it into the guest OS and install it, it then communicates back to the Sentinel Gateway Appliance and is picked up by the HCX Manager as you can see in the above screenshot. Now this is a good time to plug my co-workers’ blog https://www.chrisdooks.com/2022/02/24/automating-the-hcx-osam-sentinel-agent-install-via-sccm/ He discusses how to push the sentinel agent out via SCCM for Windows machines, which is much better than manually copying it across to various Windows […]

Lets Talk About Protecting and Recovering VMs with #VCDR #vExpert

December 6, 2021 Bilal Ahmed 0

So now we have deployed and configured VCDR, now we can go into all the bits that allow you to protect your VMs and failover! Protection Groups So now we can get into the nitty-gritty of starting to create Protection Groups and Recovery Plans. This is the meat of it all, where you define what is going to be protected and how it should be recovered. As you can see you can define how VMs are added to the protection group by using Naming Patterns, Tags or VM Folders. In this example I have used vSphere Tags: In my vCenter you can see I have created a tag specifically for VCDR to use: Then we can look at the various […]

Let’s talk about configuring and deploying VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery #VCDR #vExpert

November 22, 2021 Bilal Ahmed 0

So, let’s talk about VCDR VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery. It was acquired from Datrium and I have some customers who are in the process of looking into it and deploying it. If you have ever used SRM, you will feel very at home with VCDR, as you will see as I explain it in more detail. I am a big fan of DR in general, I used to work for a BC/DR provider, and I lost count of the number of times people never tested their plans and were then surprised they didn’t work as they had hoped. I always used to say, you should be happy they failed now, imagine if this had been real and you couldn’t recover! […]

Automating HCX Cutover using PowerCLI #HCX #PowerCLI #vExpert

November 15, 2021 Bilal Ahmed 0

So I was provided with a script from my buddy Charlie at Tower Associates, and then myself and Dean Lewis edited it a bit to make it work alongside the scripts we had already produced in our previous posts. I’ve always been an advocate of doing the cutover manually. Cutting over 200 VMs or so in one go is daunting and lacks the control I would personally like. I like to be able to tell customers, ok we have cut over these 20 VMs for this app, please get them to test it, then when they are happy move to the next set. It is nice and controlled and instils confidence in the migration process. That is not to say […]

HCX DR Use Cases #HCX #DR #vExpert

November 8, 2021 Bilal Ahmed 0

*These are my own ramblings and nothing I say is officially supported by VMware!* So HCX does have a DR feature. It does not get talked about much, because at VMware if you are talking fully-fledged DR you will be looking into SRM and the new offering VCDR. The HCX DR service uses vSphere Replication (VR) under the hood in the same way, SRM can use vSphere Replication. The main difference is that the IX appliance in the service mesh is the vSphere Replication Manager. SRM does full-on DR orchestration, failing over VMs in a specific order, with recovery plans, HCX does not do any of that. When I have talked to GSS and some customers, I have discovered that […]

SDDC to SDDC Migrations #VMConAWS #HCX #Migrations

November 1, 2021 Bilal Ahmed 2

So I had a customer recently that had deployed a VMConAWS SDDC using a /23 subnet. This is fully supported, but they then ran into scalability issues as that subnet is limited to only allow 27 ESXi hosts. So now they wanted to scale beyond that but were stopped by this configuration limit. Now you can’t adjust that post-deployment, so this lead to a discussion about standing up a new SDDC and migrating to it or migrating into an existing SDDC that uses /20 subnet. Now there are 2 supported ways to do that using HCX and I am going to discuss both of them. I have 2 SDDCs : TF_TEST and SDDC-Jeff (great names I know!) Option 1: Deploy […]

HCX and SDWAN with VMC on AWS #HCX #VMConAWS #SDWAN

August 30, 2021 Bilal Ahmed 0

So as of HCX 4.2, it is now supported to have HCX use SD-WANs. The exact requirements are listed here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-HCX/4.2/hcx-user-guide/GUID-8128EB85-4E3F-4E0C-A32C-4F9B15DACC6D.html I managed to catch up with my buddy @gabe_rosas who I the TPM for HCX, as I had a couple of customers that were curious about this new addition. Based on my discussion with him I thought id make a blog post about it! There was a blanket lack of support for HCX VPN in underlay, as it is essentially a VPN and then HCX creates its own VPN tunnels. Now there is support but you must be careful you are on the correct version and meet all the underlay requirements. So, the fact that it is supported brings […]

HCX Mobility Group Migrations using PowerCLI Scripts #HCX @VMwareHCX #PowerCLI #vExpert @saintdle

July 8, 2021 Bilal Ahmed 3

Nothing posted here is supported by VMware 🙂 So when the original scripts were created, HCX Mobility Groups weren’t even a thing! HCX evolves at a rapid rate and I was working with a customer who was using the original scripts but since they were migrating into VMware Cloud on AWS they had access to the Mobility Groups features! The original scripts can be found here. When working on these scripts with my buddy @saintdle we found that the way people had started using them didn’t work as expected for us, we tried William Lam’s script and we received errors: We tried this as well and came across similar issues: Zsoldier’s Tech Blog Also, the customer when trying the scripts […]