When we assist customers in designing a new VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC the question of Layer 2 extension comes up frequently. The reasons to extend on-prem networks are unique to each environment and can be a temporary state during migration or a long term strategy to ease scalability and bursting to the cloud.
VMW on AWS provides two options for extending an on-prem network to the SDDC - HCX Network Extension (NE) and Layer 2 VPN. While both solutions provide the same functionality they are different in several aspects. I won’t go into a detailed comparison in this post, but most users, especially if they are not very familiar with networking, will find that HCX NE is easier to configure and scale.