What is HCX Multi Site Services Mesh?

What is HCX Multi Site Services Mesh?

The Multi-Site Service Mesh enables the configuration, deployment, and serviceability of Interconnect virtual appliance pairs with ease. Now you have the choice to deploy/manage HCX services with the traditional Interconnect interface or with the new Multi-Site Service Mesh. To deploy the HCX IX’s you will choose either of the method. 

Before you plan to use HCX Multi-Site Service Mesh, let’s have a look at few benefits which we get out of this feature: 

• Uniformity: the same configuration patterns at the source and remote sites.
• Re-usability: Once a compute profile is created it can be used to connect to multiple HCX sites. Hence the site administrator need not define the same things again and again.
• Multisite Ready: Compute Profiles and Network Profiles can be shared across multiple sites.
• Ease of reconfiguration: New capability to pool datastores or modify them post-Interconnect deployment.
• Scale-out deployment: The HCX-IX can be deployed per cluster or a single HCX-IX can be shared across multiple clusters.

Apart from that the are few usability enhancements that have been introduced:

• Improved interfaces display a clear deployment diagrams.
• New task tracking features give step by step details of the progress of operations
• Preview of required firewall rules for ease of configuration.

Typically a compute profile looks like as shown in below image

Once the compute profile is created in both cloud side and on-prem, we initiate the service mesh creation from on-prem side. Service mesh can’t be created from cloud side.

During service mesh creation we map the compute/network profile of on-prem with the profiles created in cloud side. Once service mesh mapping is done, we can initiate the deployment of IX appliances. 

Once the appliances are deployed in both on-prem and cloud side, we can start consuming the HCX services. 

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