Advanced Cross vCenter vMotion (XVM), baked into vSphere, is one of my favorite capabilities. It allows for lightweight live bulk migrations between vCenter instances that are in different Single Sign-On (SSO) domains. ‘Lightweight’ as it isn’t a sophisticated migration tool like HCX is, but it does set customers up to do quick and simple migrations. HCX provides far more options from an orchestration, scheduling, and migrations perspective. Compelling XVM use cases are quick migrations between older vSphere environments and a new VCF deployment, or even between an on-prem vSphere or VCF deployment into VMware Cloud on AWS.
Under the hood, XVM utilizes long-distance vMotion which is very forgiving regarding bandwidth and latency requirements. XVM migrations work with 150ms roundtrip latency between source and destination. The demo below is set up to use XVM between an on-prem vSphere data center in California and a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC running in Oregon. Thousands of miles apart, yet the migration is without interruption. I did leverage the HCX layer-2 network extension, set up in a high-available (HA) fashion, to make sure there is no interruption from a connectivity perspective as well. Just to showcase how easy and without interruption migrations to VMware Cloud on AWS are.
Demo
This video details the Advanced Cross vCenter vMotion capability. The demo shows the two migration workflows to perform a workload migration from an on-prem vSphere/VCF infrastructure to a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC. Migrating while the workload remains ‘live’ and accessible!
