VMware Cloud on AWS is part of a larger ecosystem of services and add-ons that enable organizations a wide variety of use cases, including migration with VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX), disaster recovery with VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) and VMware Site Recovery (VSR), advanced logging with Aria Operations for Logs, and Containers as a Service (CaaS) services with Tanzu services.
In this chapter, you will learn the basic capabilities and architecture of these services and understand the design choices when planning, implementing, and operating the HCX, VCDR, VSR, and Tanzu services.
The following are the topics that will be covered in this chapter:
- VMware HCX
- VSR
- VCDR
- The VMware Aria Operations for Logs service
- VMware Cloud with Tanzu services
VMware HCX
One of the main advantages of VMware Cloud on AWS is its operational consistency and ability to move applications to public clouds, without taking on significant risks and without the need to refactor an application when it doesn’t bring value to a business. VMware HCX provides hybrid cloud capabilities to connect between an existing on-premises site and the VMware Cloud SDDC, as well as multi-cloud connectivity capabilities.
Figure 3.1 – The HCX VM migration capabilities for VMware Cloud on AWS
VMware HCX Enterprise is included with VMware Cloud on an AWS subscription with no additional charges, and it can be activated directly from the SDDC Console.
HCX offers the following technical capabilities:
- Workload migration using dedicated network tunnels between HCX appliances: You can choose between various migration methods depending on the design requirements. We’ll discuss this in more detail later on in this section.
- A layer 2 extension: HCX provides a simple and powerful mechanism to extend existing VLANs to the cloud, enabling fully live migration capabilities. If you need to use extended VLANs after the migration is completed, HCX offers numerous additional capabilities, including high availability of the L2 extension service and mobility-optimized networking (MON) to improve traffic flow for stretched VLANs.
- WAN optimization to reduce network traffic and speed up migration.
HCX can not only be used for on-premises to cloud migration but also for cloud to cloud (between two HCX endpoints – endpoints can reside in any other cloud) and reverse migration (from the cloud to on-premises).
It has several technical prerequisites that your on-premises environment must adhere to. These depend on the HCX version used; please check the VMware documentation for more details (https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-HCX/4.7/hcx-user-guide/GUID-BFD7E194-CFE5-4259-B74B-991B26A51758.html).