HCX installation provide capabilities between a source and destination environment. Without diving into cluster level details, these are several common site level deployment topologies:

One to One HCX Site Topology (One Source HCX Site with One Destination HCX Site)

In the most basic and common topology, there is a source private vSphere environment and a destination environment, that is either private, or running on a vSphere based public cloud.

At a high level, the following configuration is needed:
– If the destination site is a public cloud, HCX is enabled (HCX Cloud is automatically deployed and configured.
– If the destination site is a private cloud, HCX Cloud is installed and configured.
– HCX Enterprise is installed at the source site. This adds the HCX plugin to the source site’s vSphere client.
– The HCX Interconnect appliances are deployed when services are enabled in the HCX plugin at the source site.
– HCX Network Extension, WAN Optimization, Migrations and DR are services operated from the source site, using the HCX Plugin.

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Many to One HCX Site Topology

When there are multiple private vSphere environments as source sites, HCX Enterprise is installed per environment. At a high level, the following configurations are needed when scaling beyond the first source site:

• When the destination “HCX Cloud” site is configured, an “Interconnect Configuration” or “Compute Profile” is created to prepare the site for deploying the Migration, Extension and Optimization service components. When designing for multiple source sites, the IP ranges defined at the HCX Cloud site should be sized to account for the maximum HCX scale.
• The HCX destination site only deploys “Peer” appliances, when the services are enabled at the source site. The naming used at the source site will be suffixed with “peer-“
• At the source site, HCX Enterprise is installed 1-to-1 with the source site vCenter Servers, each additional HCX Enterprise environment will be treated like a standalone installation, without any relation to the first HCX Enterprise installed.

USE CASE EXAMPLE:
HCX is used for Data Center consolidation. Multiple “aging” source environments will be consolidated into a higher capacity modernized destination site.

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One to Many (or Many to One) HCX Site Topology

When there are multiple destination environments required for a single source sites, a single HCX Enterprise installation is sufficient. At a high level, the following configurations happen when scaling beyond the first target site:

• The second destination site will either be another HCX enabled Public Cloud or a private vSphere environment with HCX Cloud installed.
• The plugin will be used to perform HCX Site Pairing with the second site.
• The HCX plugin can now be used to perform an HCX Interconnect configuration or Service Mesh deployment (newer) for the new target environment.

USE CASE EXAMPLE:
HCX is used for quickly connecting, and consuming VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) SDDC. For scaling purposes, additional VMC SDDCs are created.

Source Linked Mode vCenters

HCX supports multiple source site vCenter Servers in Linked Mode. At a high level, the following configuration is needed:

• HCX Enterprise is deployed per vCenter Server.
• Each HCX Enterprise is configured to reference the shared PSC.
• (Although the image below shows a single Interconnect, it is deployed per environment, like in the Many to One Site Topology above.)

Any of the source site HCX plugins can be used to trigger HCX operations.

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Gabe