VMware HCX for Ongoing Workload Rebalancing

Introduction

Cloud migration is not a one-time event. In today’s cloud services environment, it’s becoming clear that no single platform or provider will meet the needs of every business or application. Organizations adapt their infrastructure and applications to become more agile, which reflects in the growing adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud strategies. Choosing the right platform today may not mean having the right platform next year. To ensure business-critical workloads always operate in the optimal environment to meet security, compliance, performance, availability, and financial needs, organizations must create and maintain hybrid connectivity for application migration and ongoing workload rebalancing.

Key reasons for workload rebalancing

• Demand and usage – All applications have lifecycles. It’s important to continually evaluate their level of demand and resource consumption to determine the optimal environment in which to run them to meet cost and performance goals.
• Capacity shifts – Where data center capacity adapts slowly and predictably, public cloud capacity needs can often change rapidly. Organizations should be aware of long- and short-term public cloud commitments and available on-premises resources, and move workloads accordingly.
• Business changes – Adding data center capacity through mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activities or planning for data center closures can have a significant impact on both application delivery and infrastructure capacity needs.
• Application support – As applications evolve, so will the level of support required to maintain service-level agreements (SLAs), meet security and compliance requirements, and deliver desired responsiveness.

The HCX application migration and mobility platform

The VMware HCX platform automates the creation of a hybrid interconnect to enable IT, administrators, to easily and securely migrate workloads to the cloud while maintaining IT best practices, operations, and business continuity. Leveraging HCX for application mobility accelerates data center transformation and hybrid cloud adoption with seamless migration of VMware vSphere and non-vSphere workloads on-premises and in the cloud without upgrading vSphere versions. Enabling secure, large-scale, zero-downtime live migrations can accelerate time to value for new software-defined data center (SDDC) stacks and cloud environments while driving down operational costs to update, migrate and maintain disparate systems.

Key capabilities

• Perform a bulk migration of live VMs – Simply schedule the movement of hundreds of VMs in parallel.
• Utilize simple migration planning tools – Easily identify the application and workload relationships, and logically group VMs for efficient migration. Enable mobility across data centers and clouds
• Move VMs within your data center—from your local data center to the cloud, or across cloud regions or providers—to optimize resource utilization.
• Migrate with zero downtime – Don’t worry about IP re-architecting.
• Migrate across any vSphere versions (5.0+) – Eliminate the need to invest in bringing both sites up to parity, enabling you to modernize your data centers with the full SDDC/VMware Cloud Foundation™ stack, managed service, or infrastructure as a service (IaaS).
• Migrate non-vSphere workloads – Migrate KVM and Hyper-V workloads to current vSphere versions compatible with full VMware Cloud™, VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware Cloud Provider™ Program, and IaaS offerings.
• Work across the WAN and LAN – This enables a unique model of infrastructure with a mix of private, public, and hybrid clouds, based on workload requirements. Seamlessly extend your network and IP space – Extensively reduce complexity and ensure your IP addressing policies, security policies, and administrative boundaries are not broken.