HCX, VMware’s Top-Secret Sauce, Comes Out

If you think VMware’s secret sauce is its network virtualization platform NSX (as I did), you’re wrong. The real secret sauce is HCX, its application migration and mobility software, which is much spicier.“We are truly the secret, secret sauce, and ideally not a secret much longer,” said Thomas McCafferty, senior director of product marketing at VMware.The company this week launched HCX as a standalone product and added cloud migration and other capabilities to the platform. For example, it can now can do large-scale, live migrations of VMware vSphere and non-vSphere workloads.“We’ve been selling HCX for six quarters,” McCafferty said, adding that this week’s announcement “is really a coming out party for HCX.” If you’re scratching your head, wondering why you’ve never heard of HCX before (as I was), there’s good reason for that. Up until now, VMware has embedded the software in its other products and sold it through NSX Enterprise Plus, VMware Cloud on AWS, and its VMware Cloud Provider Program (VCPP). “Essentially this is an automated L2-L3 network connection designed to bridge VMware stacks, site to site, with hybrid interconnect,” McCafferty said.