Recently took some health related leave… which had to go a bit longer than originally intended! But it was time well spent – the additional recovery allowed me to properly return to working order. I’m sending this out for completeness. HCX R142 shipped out the weekend – I will be highlighting those things very soon.

R141 NEW FEATURES

OS-Assisted Migrations (OSAM) Update to Certified Operating Systems

OSAM enables the conversion and migration of KVM and Hyper-V virtual machines into a vSphere environment using the HCX platform and workflows. 

HCX R141 certifies:
– Support for migrating Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and 18.04 LTS Virtual Machines in Hyper-V environments.

– Support for migrating CentOS 7.8 and RHEL 7.8 Virtual Machines in both Hyper-V and KVM environments.

To recap the total of the certified operating systems

Read the OSAM launch blog.
Read Understanding OS Assisted Migration in VMware docs.

Serviceability Enhancements

Going to lean on our handy RN text here, these are minor changes.

• vCenter Alarms
  The HCX Manager maintains ongoing communication with connect.hcx.vmware.com for system licensing and heuristics. If that connection is broken, the HCX Manager now generates a vCenter alarm. 
  
  Along with this change, some internal fixes were implemented to improve the recovery of the connection (to reduce scenarios where you need to restart the HCX services).
  
• Force Removal of Inactive DR Protections   
  Following a failed DR Protection operation, where replication is inactive and the inventory record becomes not actionable from the UI, use the Force Remove option to delete that protection and clear all internal objects. The option may need to be run more than once, at source and destination HCX Managers. The VM will be removed from the inventory of protected VMs and it will become available to start a new DR protection.
  
  The Force Remove operation clears all protection and replication data for that VM and the option is intended to be used as a last resource only, once the underlying cause for the failure has been identified. The recommendation is to always collect the support bundle on both HCX Connector and Cloud Manager prior to executing the removal for post analysis.

RESOLVED DEFECTS

Resolved Migration Issues

• PR/2441241 – Improved the data flow performance of the Host Based Replication Server (HBRSVR) to better handle VR Bulk Migration of large VMs with high data change rate.
   
• PR/2572289 – Fixed an issue causing Bulk migrations that remain in initial sync state for more than 7 days after stop receiving replication updates
   
• PR/2575521 – Fixed a rare condition where a failed vMotion or Cold migration workflow, caused by the loss of communication with the target host during the initial stages of the relocation and if aborted by the user via the UI, it may result on the removal of the source VM.

Resolved Platform Issues

• PR/2557328 – Fixed an issue with the messaging service in HCX Connector and Cloud Manager that may cause messages to be dropped unexpectedly during startup. A restart of Application service will restore the messaging service. Refer to the Troubleshooting section in the HCX documentation for more details on restarting services. The version of Kafka server included in HXC has been updated to 2.5.0 to address this and several other issues found with the previous version 2.3.1.
   
• PR/2528346 – Fixed an issue causing HCX components to send all local traffic to the default gateway when the Management and Uplink interfaces are part of the same Network Profile.

Resolved Deployment Issues

• PR/2561743 – Fixed an issue preventing deployment of the HCX Network Extension if the HCX Connector is not configured with NSX.
   
• PR/2577062 – Fixed an issue causing the failure to create or edit Compute Profiles in the VMware Cloud on AWS.

Resolved Serviceability and Usability Issues

• PR/2373573, PR/2392861, PR/2431276 – Enhanced the enforcement of the communication between the HCX Connector/Cloud Manager and the HCX Service. If the systems remain disconnected over the 7 days grace period, any migration workflows that started prior to the expiration date will be serviced to completion but no new migrations will be allowed until the communication is re-established.
   
• PR/2567151, PR/2482028 – Fixed an issue where the HCX plug-in shows duplicate entries for various screens (service mesh, migration data, site pairings) in environments that are configured in Hybrid Linked Mode.