In my recent ‘Getting started with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OVCS)’ post; Getting Started With Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS) – Connecting To An On-Premises Environment we set up hybrid connectivity between our on-premises vSphere environment and our OCVS SDDC allowing our on-premises workloads to communicate with workloads running in our workload overlay network.

Posts in this series:

• Deploying A Bastion Host
• Deploying The SDDC With HCX
• Deployment Overview
• Networking Configuration
• Connecting To Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Services
• Connecting To An On-Premises Environment
• Migrating Workloads Using VMware HCX

In this blog post, which is the last blog post in this series, we are going to install VMware HCX in our on-premises vSphere environment and set up a site-pairing between our on-premises environment and our OCVS SDDC. Once we have HCX configured, we will test our connectivity by migrating workloads between our sites. We will also configure an extended network between both sites using HCX. This allows virtual machines to move between sites without the need to change IP addresses.

NOTE: As this is not a HCX focused post, we will not be going into the details of how we configured our HCX service mesh. If you are not familiar with configuring HCX, I’d recommend following VMware’s official documentation: VMware HCX User Guide.

Here is a high-level diagram of what we are going to be configuring.

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Following on from my recent post; Getting Started With Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS) – Deploying A Bastion Host which documents the steps needed to deploy a bastion host on Oracle Cloud, that will be used to access our OCVS SDDC. We can now deploy the SDDC, including VMware HCX (optional).

Posts in this series:

• Deploying A Bastion Host
• Deploying The SDDC With HCX
• Deployment Overview
• Networking Configuration
• Connecting To Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Services
• Connecting To An On-Premises Environment
• Migrating Workloads Using VMware HCX

As you will see, the deployment process is very simple and straightforward. Once we have successfully deployed the SDDC and HCX, in the next blog post in this series, we’ll take a closer look at how the solution is deployed within Oracle Cloud.

Prerequisites

• SSH Keys
  During the deployment of our bastion host, we created a set of keys (public and private) that were used to access the bastion host via SSH. The same approach is used with the ESXi hosts in the SDDC. Instead of providing a root password, we need to supply our public key.

Deploying the SDDC

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I’m just putting together this short post more for my own benefit more than anyone else’s. This has happened to me a few times, so I wanted to document it down somewhere so I don’t forget it again.

After deploying HCX within VMC on AWS, I am unable to access the public HCX Manager URL.

After speaking with the VMC on AWS support team, they informed me that I needed to add a Firewall entry to the Management Gateway Firewall.

The rule configuration was as follows:

• Name: HCX External Access (you can name this whatever you wish)
• Sources: ANY
• Destinations: HCX (this is a predefined entry)
• Services: HTTPS (TCP 443), ICMP (Echo Request)
• Action: Allow

Once the Firewall rule was published, I was able to access HCX Manager. Hopefully, they’ll automate this process in the future or add it to the documentation somewhere.