Note – All notes herein are ‘mine’ and not in anyway official commentary from VMware / Broadcom.
Note – Any code posted here is not supported and should be used at your own risk.
Welcome to this 9 part series on ‘Automation HCX’.
The goal of this series is to help people hit the ground running with HCX, automate builds, config and use.
The following topics are covered:
- A Beginners Guide to HCX Scripting
- An Overview of HCX
- Deploying HCX OVAs
- Creating Site Pairings
- Base HCX Manager Configuration
- HCX API Explorer
- Network and Compute Profiles
- Service Meshes
- Automating HCX Migrations
Background – I have been using VMware HCX for a few years now and would like to share some of my experience to help others like me out there.
Lets start of with ‘What is HCX?‘
VMware HCX is a product designed to facilitate data mobility, virtual machine (VM) migration, and disaster recovery services for VMware-based workloads.
A primary use case of HCX is to aid in the migration of hundreds or thousands of VMs from old to new data centers and virtual infrastructures, such as VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).
HCX offers the ability to perform multiple changes to VMs during migration, including upgrading tools and hardware, changing network port groups, storage profiles, and folders or clusters.
While these tasks can be done manually through vCenter or multiple PowerShell scripts, HCX provides a centralized, user-friendly Web UI to streamline the process.
Why Script HCX?
The Web UI for HCX is efficient and meets the necessary requirements. However, when scaling out and migrating multiple batches of 10 to 100 VMs, each with different configurations, making all those changes in the UI quickly becomes cumbersome and impractical.
HCX offers powerful configuration options via its API, along with support through a PowerCLI module called PowerHCX.
This blog will provide examples using a combination of API and PowerCLI commands to accomplish various tasks.
The sections will be organized as follows:
- Overview of HCX
- Deploying HCX Managers
- Configuring HCX Managers
- Creating Profiles
- Creating Service Meshes
- Creating and Scheduling Batches
Ready to move on? Click here for blog 2 of 9 – An Overview of HCX