What was announced?

Today, VMware announced VMware HCX Technologies at VMworld Europe 2017. VMware HCX Technologies enable large-scale app mobility between on-premises vSphere platforms and one or more VMware Clouds. It is offered as a SaaS service and will be initially available through VMware Cloud Providers IBM and OVH later in 2017.

What is VMware HCX Technologies?

At the heart of the service is the technology first developed by VMware for its Hybrid Cloud Manager (HCM) solution. HCX Technologies are an evolution of it. HCM was used extensively within vCloud Air.

What do VMware HCX Technologies enable?

HCX technologies abstract multisite resources and presents them to the apps as one continuous hybrid cloud, providing infrastructure hybridity. It enables a number of use cases to drive cloud adoption in heterogeneous environments. Common use cases are extend to cloud, disaster recovery, multi-cloud application support and shift and lift migration to the cloud. There is no application re-design or retrofitting required. The infrastructure provides the hybridity.

How do VMware HCX Technologies work?

HCX allows supports different versions of vSphere as source and destination. The minimal supported version is vSphere 5.5. It also supports migration from and to vCloud Director. Of course you can also migrate across SSO domains. There is no prerequisite for NSX but using NSX allows extended use cases to be enabled. You can extend on-premises Virtual Machine networks over the highly secure HCX hybrid interconnect with built-in WAN optimization. VMs can be live migrated or can be migrated in bulk using a scheduled reboot to cloud.

Conclusion

HCX enables cross-cloud mobility for heterogeneous environments running different versions of vSphere or vCloud Director. If this prohibits you from adopting cloud technology, HCX might solve your problems and bridge that initial gap.