NSX-T Opaque Networks now supported with Cross vCenter Workload Migration Fling

The Cross vCenter Workload Migration Fling continues to be an extremely powerful tool for our customers and I just love hearing successful customer stories like the one recently shared by Jason on how the tool allowed him to easily migrate over 600 Virtual Machines and with more to come!

Moved 600 and looking at another thousand. Some monster VMs... our test environment moved as easy as vmotion.

— JT (@TheJasonThoms) April 9, 2019

One capability that customers have been asking for is the ability to migrate to and from an NSX-T Opaque Network type, which the current Fling does not support. This has become more and more important as the default NSX stack for VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) is now NSX-T by default, rather than NSX-V. We are also seeing requests from on-premises customers who have deployed NSX-T for their next generation infrastructure and needing the ability to easily migrate workloads between their old infrastructure that maybe running VSS/VDS or NSX-V backed networks.

With the help from two new colleagues, Vikas Shitole and Rajmani Patel, we are excited to announce the release Cross vCenter Workload Migration v2.6 which now adds support for NSX-T Opaque Networks!

On-Prem to VMC SDDC with NSX-T Opaque Networks

Here is a screenshot migrating several workloads from an on-premises vSphere environment with NSX-V to VMC SDDC with NSX-T.

"Bulk" Cross Cluster vMotion in VMC SDDC

An additional use case that the Fling now enables within VMC (also applies to on-premises vSphere) is ability to perform "bulk" VM migration between vSphere Clusters within an SDDC.

Although this workflow is already supported using the vSphere H5 Client, I have found when selecting multiple VMs for migration, the UI requires the user to specify an ESXi host rather than a Resource Pool. In VMC, this is not possible as customers do not have direct access to the underlying ESXi host and simply specifying the Resource Pool should work (I have already filed a bug for this). Rather than migrating a single VM at a time using the H5 Client, you also now use the Fling to help you easily vMotion or cold migrate a number of VMs between different clusters within an SDDC.

Lastly, here is a quick table to help summarize the different supported migration options. Today, vCenter Server does not support vMotion between two different NSX-T N-VDS and this is called out in the last three entries. However, if you are a VMC Customer, the HCX team has just released R117 release which actually allows you to migrate between two different NSX-T environments within VMC and this could be an alternative if you need to move workloads between two different SDDC.

We hope you give the new Fling a try and if you have any feedback or enhancements, please leave a comment on the Flings page as this is the best place to engage with our Engineers.