FluidCloud launches vHOP to speed VMware exit plans

FluidCloud has launched vHOP, a VMware exit package for enterprises. It is designed to map VMware environments and prepare migrations before workload data moves.

The launch comes as some companies reassess migration plans after changes affecting access to the VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit, or VDDK, which many agentless migration tools have relied on to read virtual disks.

vHOP, short for VM Hopping Engine, is available through the FluidCloud platform and supports AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Nutanix. It maps a VMware estate, translates NSX firewall policy and generates Terraform for a target cloud without using VDDK.

Customers can use a self-service version to get a plan in minutes or work with FluidCloud engineers on a three-day process. The engineer-led version includes read-only discovery through vCentre and NSX Manager application programming interfaces, a review of which existing migration, backup and disaster recovery tools depend on VDDK, a firewall migration plan, Terraform modules for the destination cloud and a recommendation on the data path for each workload group.

The package targets a common problem in VMware exits: the work required beyond moving virtual machine disks. In environments using NSX micro-segmentation, firewall policy often needs to be redesigned as well as translated for the destination environment.

A key issue is the difference between NSX and AWS security models. According to FluidCloud, NSX distributed firewall rules include a default setting that allows all traffic, while AWS security groups support only allow rules. That means deny rules must be handled elsewhere, and traffic never governed by a rule must be identified before cutover.

Migration planning

vHOP is intended to start that planning work before any workload data is moved. Rather than stopping at inventory, the package produces a target architecture, a firewall migration plan and infrastructure code that can be used to build the destination environment.

That approach reflects a broader shift in cloud migration projects, where companies increasingly need to account for security policies, identity settings, network configurations and application dependencies alongside the workloads themselves. FluidCloud markets that wider process as "Cloud Cloning", which it describes as copying entire cloud environments from one platform to another and writing them out as Terraform.

Underlying that is what FluidCloud calls a Large Infrastructure Model, a live map of connections across an environment. It is used to show teams what may break before any move takes place.

Customers use the platform for migrations between clouds and for recovery when a region or provider goes down. It supports AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, VMware and Nutanix.

Industry backdrop

The product enters a market where many organisations have been reviewing their dependency on VMware tools as they plan migrations or renewals. Broadcom has said licensed use of VDDK "has always been backup and recovery" and that it "is not a customer entitlement", prompting some users to reconsider how they handle disk access in ongoing migration projects.

That has pushed some teams towards in-guest agents or cold copies, but FluidCloud argues that larger delays often appear elsewhere. Teams frequently discover security and dependency issues late in a migration, especially at cutover, it said.

FluidCloud also said one customer completed a migration over a weekend that had initially been scoped at eight weeks, although it did not identify the organisation or provide further detail on the project.

Sharad Kumar, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of FluidCloud, said the company built vHOP around those bottlenecks rather than disk copying alone. "Losing VDDK made copying disks harder, but the disk copy was rarely what held these projects up," Kumar said. "It's the firewall rules, the security groups and the dependencies nobody wrote down that push a migration past the renewal date. vHOP gets those mapped and turned into Terraform in three days, so a team knows what it's actually moving before it picks a tool to copy the disks."