Scaling Interconnect (IX) Appliances for Load Balancing for HCX Migration

Products

• VMware HCX

Issue/Introduction

This article provides guidance on increasing the number of Interconnect (IX) appliances and configuring load balancing across the IX appliances for HCX migration.

 

Environment

VMware HCX

Resolution

Please note that IX appliances do not support High Availability (HA) capability, only network extension (NE) appliances is currently supported. HCX does not load balance migration traffic on any additional IX appliance deployed. 

To scale IX appliances and utilise for HCX migration, deploy additional IX Service Meshes (SM) from the HCX Manager UI. This process will automatically deploy additional IX appliances, one IX pair per SM created. Refer to the documentation below for further guidance.

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/hcx/vmware-hcx/4-9/vmware-hcx-user-guide-4-9/configuring-and-managing-the-hcx-interconnect/configuring-the-hcx-service-mesh/create-a-service-mesh-for-vsphere-based-site-pairs.html

Once the Service Mesh (SM) is created, initiate a new migration, and the workload will present an option under "Interconnect Options" to select the desired IX pair for migration. This approach enables manual load balancing of migration traffic across IX appliances. Refer to the screenshots and documentation below for further details.

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/hcx/vmware-hcx/4-9/vmware-hcx-user-guide-4-9/migrating-virtual-machines-with-vmware-hcx/migrating-virtual-machines-with-hcx.html

 

 

Additional Information

Please note there is a known issue in HCX versions 4.8 and 4.9. If an HCX Bulk Migration group includes a large number of virtual machines, the Bulk Migration may fail HCX validation prior to migration. This issue is resolved in HCX version 4.10. As a workaround, recreate the migration group of virtual machines without specifying the Service Mesh in the Interconnect Options as outlined in the KB article below.

https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/368007/hcx-bulk-migration-fails-or-does-not-pro.html