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History of Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility and its productization in vSphere 7.0 Update 1c (p02)

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I am super excited to share that the popular Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility Fling has been officially productized and is now available with the release of vSphere 7.0 Update 1c (Patch 02)! The official name for this capability is now referred to as Advanced Cross vCenter vMotion, would that mean the short hand is Ax-vMotion? 🤔 In any case, this has literally been 5 years in the making from an idea that I had shared back in 2015 to now having it fully integrated as a native vSphere feature in 2020 is pretty wild!

While reflecting back and writing this blog post, I came across this tweet from our CEO, Pat Gelsinger, which I thought was quite fitting

I have learned over the years, that simply having a good idea is not enough. It takes hard work, time and perseverance.

It has been very humbling to work with so many of customers of all sizes and shapes and enabling them to take advantage of vMotion in a new way that would allow them to solve some of their unique business needs. vMotion is still as magical in 2020 as it was when VMware transformed the IT industry when it was first introduced.

Of course this would not have been possible without the support of so many amazing VMware Engineers who contributed to the Fling including the original developer, Vishal Gupta who I had worked with as part of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) team. After Vishal left VMware, I recruited a few more folks to help with the project including Vladimir Velikov, Vikas Shitole, Rajmani Patel, Plamen Semerdzhiev and Denis Chorbadjiyski. Lastly, I also want to thank Vishwa Srikaanth and Abhijith Prabhudev from the vSphere Product Management team who have been supportive of the Fling since day 1 and has been advocating with me on behalf of our customers.

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Quick Tip - How to enable vGPU vMotion in vSphere 6.7 Update 1

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Since this question has come up a few times this week, I thought it is worth a quick blog post on how to enable the new vGPU vMotion feature which is now available in latest vSphere 6.7 Update 1 release. If you try to vMotion a VM that has been configured with a vGPU, you see the following message stating vGPU hot migration is not enabled.

To enable vGPU vMotion, you just need to update the following vCenter Server Advanced Setting vgpu.hotmigrate.enabled to true using the vSphere UI. The change will go into effect immediately and you will now be able to vMotion a VM configured with vGPU. This setting is actually documented in the official vSphere documentation here, but from all the folks I spoke with, it looks like it never came up or it must have been missed.


In addition to vMotion support, you can also perform Storage vMotion & Cross vMotion (Compute & Storage) for vGPU enabled VMs. Make sure that both your vCenter Server and ESXi hosts have been upgraded to vSphere 6.7 Update 1 and that you have NVIDIA GRID hardware and VIB installed on ESXi host. For folks interested in learning more about the new vMotion features in vSphere 6.7 Update 1, be sure to check out the VMworld 2018 session What's New in vMotion Technical Deep Dive.

Lastly, for those that prefer to automate this configuration change, here is a quick PowerCLI snippet for enabling vGPU vMotion:

Get-AdvancedSetting -Entity $global:DefaultVIServer -Name vgpu.hotmigrate.enabled | Set-AdvancedSetting -Value $true -Confirm:$false

Automating new Cloud Motion with vSphere Replication using Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) API

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Cloud Motion with vSphere Replication is the newest migration type that has been added to the Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) solution, which was also demonstrated during the VMworld US 2018 keynote (watch here). Unlike the traditional Bulk Migration, which also uses vSphere Replication to perform the initial replication, Cloud Motion with VR does not incur any downtime during the VM switch over. This is possible with our most beloved vSphere feature, vMotion!

With Bulk Migration, the VM on the source vCenter Server must be shutdown before the newly replicated VM on the destination vCenter Server can be powered on or else a network conflict will occur. Using Cloud Motion with VR, the VM is simply vMotion'ed from the source vCenter Server to the destination vCenter Server and because the VM's storage has already been replicated, the only thing that needs to transfer is the memory state of the VM.


All three HCX Migration Types can be scheduled from the HCX UI using the vSphere Client or automated using the HCX API. The latter option is definitely ideal for customers with large number of migrations but it can also help with smaller migrations as it reduces the amount of user input required when using the UI and ultimately, this reduces user errors.

To help demonstrate the HCX Migration APIs, I have updated my VMware HCX PowerShell Module to include the following two new functions:

  • New-HcxMigration
  • Get-HcxMigration

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