A hypervisor outside the vSphere family. Workloads on it, or on Hyper-V, can be moved by VCF Operations HCX through OS Assisted Migration, with a Sentinel agent installed in each guest.
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Terms in this definition
- Hypervisor
The virtualisation software allowing many isolated virtual machines to run on a single physical server. The cloud provider looks after it whichever service type is used.
- vSphere
VMware's platform for virtualisation, made up of vCenter and ESX hosts, supplying compute for VCF clusters.
- Hyper-V
The hypervisor built into Windows. The VMs for the Azure Extended Network appliance require the Hyper-V role, using nested virtualisation, and an external virtual switch for each NIC.
- VCF Operations HCX
Add-on licensed for moving workloads inside and between VCF private clouds and linking those environments, offering bulk or live migration plus network extension so IP addresses can stay the same.
- OSAM
OS Assisted Migration: the VCF Operations HCX service that brings Linux and Windows guests over to vSphere from non-vSphere hypervisors like KVM and Hyper-V. Each guest gets the Sentinel agent and each site gets Sentinel appliances; at switchover the copy is adjusted and restarted, so the move is not outage-free.
- Agent
A specialised form of Microsoft Copilot set up for one particular job, pairing instructions with knowledge and skills. You can create one in Copilot Studio, SharePoint or Agent Builder, and administrators control them from the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Related terms
- oVirt KVM
A virtualisation platform built on KVM. Veeam Backup & Replication supports it via a plug-in, which can back up its VMs, create VeeamZIP copies and restore them.
- Red Hat Virtualization
Red Hat's virtualisation platform based on KVM, covered by the same plug-in used for Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager and oVirt KVM. As with all plug-in workloads, application-aware processing is not available.
- Site pairing
Connecting HCX at a source site to HCX at a destination. Pairs can be one-way, where the source initiates everything, or two-way, sharing a service mesh so either side starts migrations; KVM, Hyper-V and other non-vSphere sites join as pseudo-sites for OS Assisted Migration.
- SRG
Single-site OS Assisted Migration appliance: when HCX pairs a non-vSphere environment such as Hyper-V or KVM directly with vSphere, guests running Sentinel replicate to this appliance on the vSphere side.