VCF on VxRail Integration & Use-Cases Testing with VMC on AWS Blog Series – Part 4: Live Migration to VMC on AWS.
In part 1 of 5 parts blog series, I provided you with an overview & configuration of Hybrid Linked Mode between VMC SDDC Cloud vCenter and On-Premises VCF on VxRail.
In part 2 of 5 parts blog series, I provided you with step-by-step guide on Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) Deployment on ‘On-Premises’ & ‘VMC on AWS’
In part 3 of 5 parts blog series, I have gone through the Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) configuration.
In this part 4 of 5 parts blog series, I will cover Live Migration of Virtual Machines from On-Premises to VMC Cloud.
Migration of VMs essentially falls in the following three operational use-cases.
- Datacenter Consolidation
- Datacenter Extension
- Datacenter Replacement
All above Use-Cases have a variety of triggering points e.g Retiring DC, Upgrade of H/W, Modernizing DC, Hybrid Cloud strategy, etc.
Typically, using Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) we can perform the following type of migrations to achieve above mentioned end states.
- Live Migration
- Cold Migration
- Bulk Migration
In this blog, I will migrate a VM from On-Premises to VMC Cloud while VM is still up & running. The scenario showed in this case is a working workload being migrated live across On-Premises VCF to VMC on AWS, which shows the possibility of more complex scenarios built on a live server.
May be in future, I would love to cover bit more advance Use Case such as using a 3 tier app (web app + SQL as the DB), in particular using RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines (RP4VM) Cloud to make a copy on the cloud, which can be spin up to take the over the increased workload, and the modified DB can be failback to the On-Premises when the burst requirement is over.
As of now, to migrate VMs, we will access HCX UI component installed within the ON-Premises vCenter web client.
One of the main pre-requisite is to have 2 sites paired. Notice I have paired my On-Premises HCX with VMC SDDC HCX.
Notice site pairing status is Up.
Once the ‘Multi-Site Service Mesh’ is configured successfully, notice we have extended network to the Cloud.
The VMware HCX Network Extension can be used to create bridged multi-gigabit network segments at the target VMware HCX data center. The new stretched network is automatically bridged/aggregated with the vSphere Network at the source VMware HCX data center.
You can extend HCX networks either by configuring an individual Distributed Port Group using its context menu, or by selecting multiple Distributed Port Groups in the HCX User Interface.
In my setup, I have extended two of my NSX VxLan segments DB & Web Tiers.
Once the Networks are extended to Cloud, we should be able to migrate the Virtual Machines with VMware HCX.
Workloads can be migrated bi-directionally between data centers using various VMware HCX migration technologies.
Let us perform a Live Migration of Virtual Machine from On-Premises VCF on VxRail to VMC on AWS.
To Start Migration, go to Migration UI on the left hand side and select ‘Migrate Virtual Machine’.
The top left side shows the paired remote site.
It shows the source inventory i.e. local site where HCX is installed.
Select the Checkbox next to a workload VM that you intend to migrate, In our case we will select the VM ‘mysql-db’.
We will select ‘mysql-db’ VM to vMotion or Migrate to VMC Cloud on AWS.
Verify the IP address of VM ‘mysql-db’ which will be migrated to VMC Cloud on AWS.
Run continuous ping to VM IP that we intend to migrate. We have identified VM IP in above step.
Switch back to Migration Screen.
Select appropriate various migration screen options.
After selecting necessary Migration screen options, select ‘vMotion’ as Migration profile.
Now, we will select necessary L2E Stretched network which we extended previously as part of Network Extension.
From the dropdown menu for HCX-Stretched-Network, scroll down and select Stretched L2E DB-Tier Network.
Click Finish to validate and start the migration.
Migration has started and continuous ping going on.
13% completed so far, notice status shows ‘Creating Shadow VM’.
Continuous Ping is still going on.
15% completed so far, notice status shows ‘Relocation in Progress’.
Continuous Ping is still going on.
90% completed so far, notice status shows ‘Relocation in Progress’.
Continuous Ping is still going on..
100% completed, notice status shows ‘Applying tags/upgrades on VM’.
Continuous Ping is still going on.
Migration Completed.
Continuous going is still going on.
Congratulations!
We have vMotion’d VM from On-Premises to VMC Cloud at 0% packet loss.
In the next blog which will be a final part of the blog series, I will cover Disaster Recovery using HCX.
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