Migrating Virtual Machines with Mobility Groups

Mobility Groups is an HCX Enterprise License feature that supports assembling one or more virtual machines into logical sets, for execution and monitoring of migrations as a group.

With Mobility Groups, you have the flexibility to manage migrations for sets of virtual machines by application, network, pod, or other aspects of your environment.

Migrations are always configured using the HCX Connector or Cloud system that initiated site pairing. In Cloud-to-Cloud deployments with bidirectional site pairing, HCX in both paired sites can initiate migrations. For more information, see Adding a Site Pair.

The HCX system automatically detects virtual machine disk additions or removals and reconfigures running migrations to accommodate these changes. These disk changes are honored only if the changes occur before the migration switchover phase. If disk changes occur during the switchover phase, the changes are not recognized, which can affect the success of the migration operation. Support for adding or removing disks is available only with Bulk and Replication Assisted vMotion migrations.

Taking snapshots of a VM during migration, either manually or using a third-party backup solution, it can disrupt the migration process. To prevent any impact, it is required to stop those services that may create or remove snapshots during migration. Refer to KB79220 for more information.

Note:

For the operational limits supported with HCX migrations, see Configuration and Service Limits for VMware HCX.

Prerequisites

The HCX Enterprise license is activated.

Procedure

1. Open the HCX plug-in in the vSphere Client.
2. Select Services > Migration.

   The Migration Management interface displays a summary of groups and provides the group migration progress. For detailed group information, you can expand each group.

3. Click Migrate and select Remote Site Connection .

   The Workload Mobility interface displays a list of virtual machines (workloads) that are available for migration and that can be added to a group. You can select the Networks or Hosts and Clusters icon to update the list of virtual machines. In addition, you can use a regular expression search to filter the list of virtual machines by name.

   Note:

   If you have only one site pair, it is selected by default. For OS Assisted Migrations, select Non vSphere Inventory > Remote connections to populate the list of guest virtual machines on which you installed HCX Sentinel.

4. (Optional) To display a list of remote site virtual machines available for the reverse migration, click the Reverse Migration check box.
   Note:

   Reverse migration refers to the migration of virtual machines from an HCX destination site to a source site.

5. Specify a Group Name.
   Note:

   If no group name is provided, the system automatically assigns a five character identifier as the group name. You can change this name later by editing the group information. See Managing Mobility Groups.

6. Select the set of virtual machines to include in the group and click ADD.
   Note:

   You can add additional virtual machines to the group at any time.

7. Select the group Transfer and Placement, Switchover, and Extended options.

   The settings you provide are applied to all members of the group by default. To override the default settings for specific virtual machines in the group, select and expand the virtual machine entry, and set different options.

   Note:

   • For Bulk, Replication Assisted vMotion (RAV), or OS Assisted Migration (OSAM) type migrations, you can schedule the migration. Scheduling migrations for vMotion is not supported.

   • If the VM is powered off, Cold Migration is set by default.

   • Extended Options provide additional settings.

   • For additional information, see Additional Migration Settings.

8. Select the destination network for each virtual machine to be migrated.

   In most cases, the stretched network between the source and destination sites is automatically selected. You can change this selection as needed.

   1. Expand each virtual machine selection.
   2. Next to each guest virtual machine NIC name, click the folder for a list of available target networks.
   3. Click the check box next to the network you want the guest virtual machine to map to, and then click Select.
   4. (Optional) To specify a new guest OS IP address for the virtual machine at the target network, expand the NIC entry and enter the new IP address, gateway, and subnet mask.
9. To complete the Mobility Group migration operation, select Go, Validate, Save, or Close to complete the Mobility Group migration operation:

   Migration operation	Result
   Go	Validates your virtual machine migration selections, saves the group, and then starts the migration.
   Validate	Validates readiness of selected virtual machine for migration without starting the migration. Validation can be done at any time on selected virtual machines or a group.
   Save	Saves migration selections as drafts for future editing or scheduling without starting the migration.
   Close	Cancels your selections without creating a group or starting a migration.