Migration

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

HCX Service Mesh Considerations #HCX @VMwareHCX #vExpert

January 20, 2020 Bilal Ahmed 0

So let us have a quick overview of HCX Service Meshes before we continue: Service Meshes can contain all 3 appliances or just an Interconnect appliance or just a Layer 2 Ext appliance, depending on your needs. The WAN Optimiser is optional. Features are always being added to HCX, but these are the key services/appliances. The Interconnect (IX) appliance holds most of the services, I tell people to think of it as a vSphere Replication Manager, as that is one of the main services it holds. HCX uses vSphere Replication for all its replication bits, so the same pros and cons that apply to vSphere Replication apply here as well! How the Mesh is configured and deployed is dependant on […]

HCX Gotchas Vol 1

September 2, 2019 Bilal Ahmed 3

Right so I have been spending a lot of time working with and learning HCX recently. There are loads of people telling you how great it is and the funky things it can do (and it is great). BUT there are things that can trip you up when deploying it, and every-time I have come across one I have documented it, in the hope that I can help people who deploy it and configure it in the future! Deploying HCX Manager Now HCX is a bit of a resource hog, especially when you start deploying the additional appliances, so I was hoping to make full use of my Intel NUCs but that wasn’t meant to be. HCX Managers need 4x […]