Tag Archives: HCX

VMware Cloud on AWS – What’s New – November 2025

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I posted a little while ago about what’s new in VMware Cloud on AWS, particularly as it related to stretched cluster enhancements. The team has been working hard on a few new features, and I thought I’d cover them off briefly here. More detail can be found in the VMware Cloud on AWS Release Notes are here.

 

What’s New?

Improved Stretched Cluster Scale Down Support

When working with stretched clusters in VMC previously, there was a rule that, once a stretched cluster grew to 6 hosts, they couldn’t be reduced back down below that number. As requirements change over time, and customers look at alternative solutions and deployment topologies, this has become something of a blocker in terms of flexible deployment options. To combat this challenge, customers can now scale down from 6 or more hosts to 4 hosts (2 hosts per Availability Zone) or 2 hosts (1 host per Availability Zone). Why would you need to do this? You might have had a stretched cluster with I3.metal nodes deployed in it and you’ve recently converted that cluster to I4i.metal nodes. You very likely won’t need as many I4i nodes as you did I3s, so this gives you the option to reduce the cluster to an appropriate size. There are, of course, some constraints:

  • Firstly, if you’re using a “Large” (as opposed to Regular or Medium) management appliance deployment in your primary cluster, you can’t scale down below 6 hosts (3 per site).
  • Secondly, if you’re using custom CPU counts, and that count is 8, you can only scale down to 4 hosts (2 per site).
  • Finally, if you’re trying to scale down your cluster and that would leave the cluster with insufficient resources for your management and workload VMs, you won’t be able to do it. That is, you can’t make away resource constraints.

Note that if you are scaling down to 4 or 2 hosts, the Elastic DRS (EDRS) policy will be changed to “Storage Scale Up Only”. This ensures that EDRS won’t scale in your cluster leaving you with availability issues.

Have a stretched cluster and want to remove hosts? You can use this documentation to get it done. I’ve also covered the process here.

HCX version 4.11.3 Now Available for VMware Cloud on AWS

It is recommended that customers upgrade to HCX 4.11.3 as soon as possible to avoid support issues. It’s important to note that the “WAN optimization feature is no longer available. Before upgrading, users must deselect and remove all existing WAN-OPT appliance services from all Service Meshes and compute profiles. The upgrade will not proceed until the WAN-OPT appliance is removed from all Service Meshes as well as all compute profiles deployed in a given HCX connector / cloud system”. You can find out what’s new in HCX in the Release Notes.

 

Thoughts

Stretched clusters have been a great solution for VMC customers, but have, at times, denied customers the ability to make use of flexible deployment models. The addition of non-stretched clusters in stretched cluster SDDCs in September, and the ability to scale down below the current threshold of 6 hosts, should help customers make the most of their stretched clusters while still enjoying the ability to work with a more flexible topology. I’m also a big fan of HCX, particularly supported versions of HCX. VMware Cloud on AWS is still around, and still doing a great job of hosting VMware-based workloads on AWS infrastructure. The team continues to make enhancements to the product, and I’m looking forward to talking about what’s coming next month as well. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out and I can help, or point you to someone who can.