Virtualization software company VMware Inc. today is updating the enterprise version of its VMware HCX application mobility platform with some useful new capabilities, including the ability to perform live migrations of both vSphere and other workloads.

VMware HCX Enterprise is a set of integrations that connects various on-premises systems, private clouds, VMware Cloud on AWS and hosted cloud infrastructures, creating a hybrid or multicloud environment for vSphere workloads.

Meanwhile, vSphere is the company’s main suite of server virtualization products that includes its ESXi hypervisor and vCenter management software.

The idea with VMware HCX Enterprise is that customers can seamlessly migrate workloads among different information technology environments without making any changes to the application code or configuration. VMware HCX essentially makes hybrid cloud and multicloud strategies a reality, giving companies the agility and flexibility to run each of their workloads on the most suitable infrastructure.

HCX Enterprise previously only worked with vSphere-based virtualized workloads, but with today’s release the company is adding support for workloads running on alternative hypervisors such as KVM and Hyper-V.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said this new feature was a smart move by VMware, since the only way for its hypervisor to grow market share from existing virtualized workloads is to provide tools that can help companies move these from competing platforms.

“As with all automated tools, CxOs will want to see quality and success in practical deployments, but they will generally welcome the ability to migrate workloads between hypervisors and increasing, different cloud infrastructures,” Mueller said.

The latest release also sees HCX Enterprise integrate more tightly with vMotion, which is a component of vSphere that enables the live migration of a virtual machine’s file systems from one storage system to another without any disruptions. The idea is that vMotion can take advantage of HCX’s bulk migration capabilities, giving users the ability to mass-migrate VM file systems and schedule these as necessary.

VMware is also integrating HCX with its VMware Site Recovery Manager service, thereby providing better backup and recovery capabilities in the event that anything goes wrong with a migration.

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