System Services

To build and maintain a secure optimized transport fabric between paired sites, and to provide feature rich functionality, HCX managed sites run various connectivity and mobility services.

HCX services fall into two general categories: Advanced and Enterprise. HCX Advanced delivers basic connectivity and mobility services to enable hybrid interconnect and migration services. HCX Enterprise provides additional functionality for scalability and performance when transforming large data centers or moving large quantities of virtual machines to cloud infrastructures.

The services available with HCX depend on the on the license type used to activate the system. For a list of services available with each type of license, see About HCX Licensing.

Advanced Services	Description
Interconnect	This service creates and secures connections between HCX installations, supporting management, migration, replication, and disaster recovery operations. This service is deployed as a virtual appliance.
WAN Optimization	The WAN Optimization service works with the HCX Interconnect service to improve the network performance through a combination of deduplication, compression, and line conditioning techniques. This service is deployed as a virtual appliance.
Network Extension	This service extends the Virtual Machine networks from an HCX source site to an HCX remote site. Virtual Machines that are migrated or created on the extended segment at the remote site are Layer 2 adjacent to virtual machines placed on the origin network. This service is deployed as a virtual appliance.
Bulk Migration	This service uses VMware vSphere Replication protocol to move virtual machines in parallel between HCX sites.
vMotion Migration	This migration method uses the VMware vMotion protocol to move a single virtual machine between HCX sites with no service interruption.
Disaster Recovery	The HCX Disaster Recover service replicates and protects virtual machines to a remote data center.

Enterprise Services	Description
Mobility Groups	This service supports assembling one or more virtual machines into logical sets for migration and monitoring as a group. Group migration provides the flexibility to manage migrations by application, network, or other aspects of your environment.
Mobility Optimized Networking (MON)	MON is an enterprise capability of the VMware HCX Network Extension (HCX-NE) feature. MON enables optimized workload mobility for virtual machine application groups that span multiple segmented networks or for virtual machines with inter-VLAN dependencies, as well as for hybrid applications, throughout the migration cycle. Migrated virtual machines can be configured to access the internet and cloud provider services optimally, without experiencing the network tromboning effect.
Network Extension High Availability	Network Extension High Availability protects extended networks from disruptions associated with Network Extension appliance downtime. Network Extension High Availability creates a redundant pair, or group, of connections for Network Extension appliances. In the event that a Network Extension appliance fails or is taken offline, the active connection fails over to the standby connection, and the extended network operations continue without interruption.
OS Assisted Migration	This migration service moves Linux- or Windows-based non-vSphere guest virtual machines from their host environment to a VMware vSphere data center. The OSAM service operates in one of two modes: multi-site and single-site. Multi-site mode applies in site pairs where vSphere is running at both the source and destination sites. In this mode, HCX deploys the HCX-SGW (Sentinel GateWay) appliance at the source site and the SDR (Sentinel Data Receiver) appliance at the destination site. Single-site mode applies in site pairs where a non-vSphere site is paired with a vSphere site. In this mode, HCX deploys the HCX-SRG (Sentinel Replication Gateway) appliance at the destination site where the non-vSphere workloads will be migrated. Regardless of the mode, every guest workload requires the installation of HCX Sentinel software.
Replication Assisted vMotion (RAV)	This service uses both VMware Replication and vMotion technologies for large-scale, parallel migrations with no service interruption.
HCX Assisted vMotion (Direct)	The HCX Assisted vMotion (HAV) service works in conjunction with native cross-vCenter vMotion migration to orchestrate migrations between the VMware ESXi hosts associated with the source and destination vCenters.
Workload Migration for NSX V2T	This service combines the wave orchestration and operational capabilities of HCX with the performance and concurrency characteristics of HCX Assisted vMotion to expedite virtual machine migration from an NSX for vSphere environment to an NSX environment.
Traffic Engineering Application Path Resiliency TCP MSS Clamping (TCP Flow Conditioning) Generic Receive Offload (GRO) Tunnel Encryption (Network Extension or migration services)	VMware HCX provides settings for optimizing network traffic for HCX Interconnect and Network Extension services. Application Path Resiliency is available for either Interconnect or Network Extension services. This setting creates multiple tunnel flows for both Interconnect and Network Extension traffic, that can follow multiple paths across the network infrastructure from the source to the destination data centers. The service then intelligently forwards traffic through the tunnel over the optimal path and dynamically switches between tunnels depending on traffic conditions. Application Path Resiliency forwards traffic over one tunnel at a time and does not load balance across multiple paths. TCP MSS Clamping is available for Network Extension service. This setting adjusts the segment size during the TCP connection handshake between end points across the Network Extension. This optimizes the average packet size to reduce fragmentation and lower the overall packet rate. Generic Receive Offload is available for the Network Extension service. HCX reassembles inbound packets into larger ones before delivery to the workload applications, allowing for enhanced application performance. Tunnel encryption is available for either Network Extension or HCX migration services. By default, this setting uses transport encryption to protect Network Extension data and migration traffic between site pairs. Deactivating encryption may increase performance for migration or Network Extension connections. Deactivating encryption is available only on Uplink networks that have been verifed as Secure in the Network Profile configuration.