Using HCX for Cloud Migrations
One of my customers is organizing a cloud migration and asked for help with the onboarding process. My team and I started doing research and we come across VMware's Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) technology. It's incredible, how did I not know about this before!? The long and short of it is that it bridges customer networks into cloud datacenters so that VMs can be vMotioned to and from the cloud. That's a very powerful position to put the customer in, as they can now migrate workload dynamically onto the cloud without taking a service outage. How's it work? HCX requires several appliances, both in the cloud and client datacenters. Those appliances serve 2 major functions: they bridge production networks and they proxy ESXi hosts. As far as network bridging is concerned, the HCX appliances function very much like an NSX Edge that is doing its own L2 bridging. From a network perspective, HCX basically looks like an upstream switch, behind which ar...