[Question] Cross VC NSX - Mobility in L3

[SrVMwarer]

Hello VMwarers!

While learning NSX in more advanced Designs/Implementations I learned that when we deploy Cross VC NSX now we have a UTZ,ULS and UDLRs good, now we don't have a strectched vSAN cluster across regions/sites suppose we have our clusters within each site no clusters configured between two sites, and the vMotion now works at L3

The point I can't understand how a host in Site-A will vMotion a VM to another host in Site-B and we haven't any shared Storage?

[Mauricio Queiroz Santos Amorim]

vMotion is supported migrating both compute and storage simultaneously. Shared storage is not mandatory. See here: Migration with vMotion in Environments Without Shared Storage

Other than that vMotion between 2 sites is not the only use case of extending L2 between sites and using Cross-VC NSX. You might also have replication being done between storage on either site so you can recover and bring up VMs on another site without changing IP address.

[SrVMwarer]

I imágened that vMotion always needs a shared storage so the service behind the scenes movies only VM configs from utilizing a host to another one, Now I think the behind the scenes service that provides us the vMotions has privileges to access, creates a shadow copy from the running VM compresses it, moves into another host another storage and then decompresses it running into the new chosen host

[Stephen Messer]

Hello Broadcom,

Great question regarding Cross-VC NSX and VM mobility across sites. When working with Cross-VC NSX, it's key to understand that it allows for Layer 3 (L3) networking between sites, enabling mobility even if you don't have shared storage across sites. This is possible due to the Universal Transport Zone (UTZ) and Universal Logical Switch (ULS) setup, which allows NSX to manage the network stretch and provide IP address continuity across different regions.

However, without a stretched vSAN cluster or shared storage, traditional vMotion across sites becomes challenging. In a typical setup, vMotion does rely on shared storage, but there are ways to configure solutions like Hybrid Linked Mode or HCX to manage workload migrations without shared storage, enabling L3-based vMotion as you've described.

If you're looking into solutions that support cross-site flexibility like this, tools like MagisTV could provide some insightful perspectives on extending your reach with similar applications. For more complex setups, though, I'd suggest exploring how HCX could complement your Cross-VC NSX setup, particularly for inter-site vMotion without shared storage.

Hope this clarifies things a bit!!