Earlier this month, VMware released a new version of HCX, the powerful multi-cloud migration solution. With the help of HCX, you can easily migrate your virtual workloads between private clouds and, more importantly, to public cloud environments like Azure VMware Solution(AVS). Additionally, when HCX is being used in conjunction with public cloud SDDCs like AVS, cloud migrations would be as easy as running a vMotion internally inside your data center. Sounds great, isn’t it!

It is also important to note that many enterprises are using only site-to-site VPN as the connectivity method for on-prem to public cloud infrastructure. Because of this, formal support of HCX over VPN underlay has been asked by many organizations and customers.

In a previous blog post, I explained how you could connect your on-prem environment using a Site-to-Site VPN to AVS. Before the release of VMware HCX 4.2, Azure ExpressRoute was the only supported underlay network that we could use between on-prem and AVS in the production environment. Even though it is supported to use VPN underlay but a certain level of bandwidth, latency, and drop rate. You can read the HCX underlay minimum requirements here but if you are planning to use HCX vMotion and Replication Assisted vMotion(RAV), you would need 250 Mbps of bandwidth, maximum of 150ms of delay, and less than 0.1% of pack drop rate.