If you think VMware’s secret sauce is its network virtualization platform NSX (as I did), you’re wrong. The real secret sauce is HCX, its application migration and mobility software, which is much spicier.

“We are truly the secret, secret sauce, and ideally not a secret much longer,” said Thomas McCafferty, senior director of product marketing at VMware.

The company this week launched HCX as a standalone product and added cloud migration and other capabilities to the platform. For example, it can now can do large-scale, live migrations of VMware vSphere and non-vSphere workloads.

“We’ve been selling HCX for six quarters,” McCafferty said, adding that this week’s announcement “is really a coming out party for HCX.”

If you’re scratching your head, wondering why you’ve never heard of HCX before (as I was), there’s good reason for that. Up until now, VMware has embedded the software in its other products and sold it through NSX Enterprise Plus, VMware Cloud on AWS, and its VMware Cloud Provider Program (VCPP). “Essentially this is an automated L2-L3 network connection designed to bridge VMware stacks, site to site, with hybrid interconnect,” McCafferty said.

The product’s first use case was to enable customers to migrate from an existing vSPhere-based cloud via the vendor’s VCPP partners, McCafferty explained. Soon after, VMware began selling its hybrid cloud service with Amazon Web Services, VMware Cloud on AWS, and “we became a great migration tool for that. HCX is the stretch and the platform to be able to do that.”

The next use case was NSX, where customers using the enterprise edition of the networking and security platform could migrate from an existing vSphere-based cloud to their on-premises software-defined data center. “One of the significant pieces of that is that we can fully manage and upgrade your vSphere versions as [the workloads] move,” McCafferty said.

And now, as VMware continues to add more cloud partners per its recent deals with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, and the upcoming AWS Outposts on-premises hardware and software stack, HCX becomes even more important in moving applications and workloads between environments, McCafferty said.

“As we continue to add more landing pads in the cloud, that’s where HCX comes into play,” he explained. “When you buy a new house, you take some of your old furniture with you. And when you’ve got four houses, you might decide this couch looks better in your lake house. This idea of [workload] rebalancing is becoming real.”

In addition to being sold as a standalone product, VMware will continue to sell HCX embedded in its existing cloud partner and NSX Enterprise Plus software. And it will add this secret sauce to its upcoming hybrid cloud services with Microsoft, Google, and AWS.

The vendor also added capabilities around workload migration, rebalancing, and disaster recovery in the new HCX release.

First, it now supports non-vSphere workload migration starting with KVM and Hyper-V. This allows customers to move KVM and Hyper-V based workloads into a VMware software-defined data center.

“We will absolutely be adding to that list,” McCafferty said, adding that VMware started with these two hypervisors because many customers are using OpenStack for their private cloud, “and a good number were KVM-based. We have a lot of customers that are interested in recovering those workloads as they make investments in our infrastructure for the future. We certainly see Hyper-V as well.”

VMware also added vMotion capabilities to HCX. While HCX focuses more on large-scale and “cold” migrations when the VMs are turned off, vMotion allows live migration of a running VM with no downtime or service disruption.

“vMotion is the best tool for one, five, 10 VMs, but not the best tool for hundreds or thousands of VMs,” McCafferty said. Combining the two provides scalability benefits of bulk migration (such as parallelism and scheduling) with the ability to migrate hundreds or thousands of live workloads at once with no downtime, he added.

And the third new capability involves disaster recovery by combining HCX with VMware’s Site Recovery Manager (SRM). This joins SRM’s disaster recovery technology with HCXs interconnect to backup and recover workloads.