In the video, villain virtual machines are migrated from Legacy data center to the modernized Redwood data center, with magnificent simplicity, using the HCX Bulk Migration service.

Bulk migration is a core feature of the HCX service. You can consider it HCX’s mobility workhorse, designed for mass parallel evacuations, with support for switchover scheduling, and resilient to variable environmental conditions.

The Legacy and Redwood environments are unaware of each other prior to layering on HCX. With HCX, they become loosely coupled, but highly compatible. The source vSphere never communicates with the destination vSphere.

Traditional migration requirements (software versions, merged authentication domains, cluster networking, and more) are abstracted, simplified or altogether eliminated when using the HCX service. Migration traffic is automatically encrypted and WAN Optimized (deduplicated) by default.

The HCX Bulk Migration service leverages the resiliency and parallelism of the vSphere Replication protocol. It has several key characteristics:

• Scheduled switchovers. The initial transfer can be planned according to available bandwidth and resources, leaving the final switchover for a schedule maintenance window.
• Bulk migrations are low-downtime (warm) operations. The source application will continue to do its job right until the switchover phase, when HCX powers it off, and symmetrically powers on the workload at the target.
• Supports old stuff. Those shiny new ESXi 5 hypervisors installed in 2011 that became important but forgotten can be evacuated with reduced risk and effort. Virtual Machines with HW Version 7 can be migrated with HCX.
• Resilient connectivity. If someone cuts the wire, migrations pause until the wire is patched up.

Bulk Migration is an HCX Advanced capability. HCX Advanced is bundled with NSX Datacenter Enterprise Plus, with VMware Cloud on AWS, and VMware Cloud Provider Partners.