It goes without saying that 2022 has been an interesting year for everyone here with Broadcom announcing the intent to acquire VMware acquisition. In my world, the HCX team continues to deliver the migration and mobility vision and enables customers to execute on their cloud adoption & multi-cloud journey!

Today I want to share some highlights in 2022:

Hundreds of Thousands of Virtual Machine Migrations!

• Our customers trusted HCX for over 365,000 virtual machine migrations (across all HCX types). This is about 26% more than in 2021.
  
• HCX Bulk Migration (the resilient warm migration workhorse with inline transformation & scripting) & Replication Assisted vMotion (mass disk seeding with live migration) are the most frequently selected migration types in 2022.
  

HCX Releases!

2022 was a furious year for HCX product teams with 7 maintenance releases; 2 feature releases, our initial, and follow up release for FedRamp High compliant GovCloud environments.
All of this while cooking up HCX for Project Northstar.

• We released two new minor releases (new features) for the core HCX product:
  
  • HCX 4.4 (Photon OS, Transport Analytics, HBR8.4, Upgrade Snapshots
    
  • HCX 4.5 (vSphere 8, NSX-V2T, Seed Checkpoint for RAV, Increased Maximums)
    
• FedRamp High Authorization was achieved and had an initial HCX release for VMware Cloud on AWS GovCloud was delivered with HCX 4.3.9. In HCX 4.5.2 we brought the GovCloud feature set to version parity.
  

Retired HCX Versions

• 2022 brings us to the lifecycle exit for HCX 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 & more recently 4.3.

• The best versions to be running today (Jan 19, 2022) are versions 4.4.3, 4.5.2 (or 4.5.1 if GovCloud)
  
  As a gentle reminder to all – HCX releases are supported for a year without a technical guidance phase. HCX continuously evolves to enable the consumption of the VMware multi-cloud bleeding edge, so product lifecycle moves quickly to allow us to adapt to new landscapes.
  
  We strongly recommend baking in one or two no-migration days every 3-6 months to upgrade deployed systems (it’s free).

Deployments

• The HCX system community grew in 2022 with over 9000 HCX installations.
  
• We also saw about 13000 system upgrades!

HCX in 2023

While nothing can be promised in this forum, I do look forward to delivering refined resiliency, improved performance, tighter VMware ecosystem integration, HCX in more clouds & a very excited next-gen migration experience with what we are building for Project Northstar.

—
Gabe