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HCX migration types#

Cold Migration (offline)#

This migration method uses the VMware NFC protocol. It is automatically selected when the source virtual machine is powered off.

vMotion (no downtime)#

This migration method is a live migration of a single VM at a time with no downtime. This is similar to a standard vSphere vMotion and is most useful when migrating production critical VMs that have high availability requirements, and zero downtime is desired.

vMotion and cold migration transfers a single virtual machine at one time. For example, if you plan to transfer 100 VMs, HCX transfers each of these machines in a serial fashion, one transfer at a time. So while this method gives you the ability to rapidly migrate a VM, it doesn’t provide you with a mechanism to migrate VMs in bulk.

HCX Bulk Migration(low downtime)#

This migration method uses the VMware vSphere Replication protocols to move the virtual machines to a remote site.

  • The Bulk Migration option is designed for moving virtual machines in parallel.
  • This migration type can be set to complete on a pre-defined schedule.
  • The virtual machine runs at the source site until the failover begins. The
service interruption with Bulk Migration is equivalent to a reboot.

Cloud Motion with vSphere Replication (no downtime)#

This is a relatively newer migration method currently available in preview for VMware Cloud on AWS. It combines the benefits of Bulk Migration (parallelism, scheduling, and so on) with the ability to migrate live workloads with no downtime.

  • Provides uUni-directional from on-premises to VMware Cloud on AWS.
  • Supports source vSphere (vCenter Server / ESXi) versions 5.5 and above.
  • Provides cross-version migration from vSphere 5.5 to the current release of 6.7 Update 1.
  • Currently does not support on-premises to on-premises migrations.
  • Concurrent migrations = 100 (initial data sync using vSphere Replication).

HCX Reverse Migration#

This feature provides you the ability to migrate VMs from your cloud environment to your on-premises environment using vMotion, Cold, and Bulk Migration methods. This is useful for situations in which it’s determined that a transferred VM, or set of VMs, isn’t suitable for the cloud.