The HCX offers various services based on the type of license installed with the system.

The HCX is available with either an Advanced and Enterprise license. Advanced license services are standard with HCX and are included with the HCX Enterprise license.
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-enabled source site to an HCX-enabled 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 enabled sites.
vMotion Migration This migration method uses the VMware vMotion protocol to move a single virtual machine between HCX enabled 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.
OS Assisted Migration This migration service moves Linux- or Windows-based guest VMs from their host environment to a VMware vSphere enabled data center.

This service comprises two appliances. The HCX Sentinel Gateway appliance is deployed the source site, and the HCX Sentinel Data Receiver appliance at the destination site.

This service also requires the installation of HCX Sentinel software on each guest machine.
Replication Assisted vMotion (RAV) This service uses both VMware Replication and vMotion technologies for large-scale, parallel migrations with no service interruption.
Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Integration This service integrates HCX functionality with the VMware SRM for protection and recovery operations.
Traffic Engineering
  • Application Path Resiliency
  • TCP Flow Conditioning
 VMware HCX provides settings for optimizing network traffic for HCX Interconnect and Network Extension services.
  • The Application Path Resiliency service creates multiple tunnel flows, for both Interconnect and Network Extension traffic, those may 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.
  • The TCP Flow Conditioning service 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.
Mobility Optimized Networking (MON) This service integrates HCX Network Extension with NSX Dynamic Routing to enable migrated virtual machines to reach other virtual machines and networks optimally, without a trombone or hairpin effect. MON can be enabled on new or existing network extensions to NSX-T 3.0 Data Centers.