vSphere 5.5 and vSAN 5.5 End of General Support

[kennysarmy]

I received this email a few weeks ago:

 

What are your thoughts as to the risk to the school on staying on 5.5 which has been very stable for us, I'd be planning to upgrade to 6.5 when we refresh our physical hosts, probably next summer!

 

 

 

 

vSphere 5.5 and vSAN 5.5 End of General Support Reminder

Dear Valued Customer,

 

We would like to remind you that the End of General Support (EOGS) for VMware vSphere® 5.5 and vSAN™ 5.5 is September 19, 2018.

To maintain your full level of Support and Subscription Services, VMware recommends upgrading to vSphere 6.5. Note that by upgrading to vSphere 6.5 you not only get all the latest capabilities of vSphere but also the latest vSAN release and capabilities.

vCloud Suite 5 and vSphere with Operations Management™ (vSOM) customers running vSphere 5.5 are also recommended to upgrade to vSphere 6.5.

For more information on the benefits of upgrading and how to upgrade, visit the VMware vSphere Upgrade Center. VMware has extended general support for vSphere 6.5 to a full five years from date of release, which will end on November 15, 2021.

 

If you require assistance upgrading to a newer version of vSphere, VMware's vSphere Upgrade Service is available. This service delivers a comprehensive guide to upgrading your virtual infrastructure including recommendations for planning and testing the upgrade, the actual upgrade itself, validation guidance, and rollback procedures. For more information, contact your VMware account team, VMware Partner, or visit VMware Professional Services.

 

If you are unable to upgrade from vSphere 5.5 before EOGS and are active on Support and Subscription Services, you may purchase Extended Support in one-year increments for up to two years beyond the EOGS date. Visit VMware Extended Support for more information.

 

Technical Guidance for vSphere 5.5 is available until September 19, 2020 primarily through the self-help portal. During the Technical Guidance phase, VMware will not offer new hardware support, server/client/guest OS updates, new security patches or bug fixes unless otherwise noted. For more information, visit VMware Lifecycle Support Phases.

[synaesthesia]

I'm not rushing into it, but I have started testing 6.5 on a few things. Happier with the web interface than previous, enough to ditch the Vsphere client once and for all. It's not going to stop working, and we've *never* used VMWare support in the 10+ years of having esx running.

[Cache]

Our plan is to do it when we replace the next host, which looking at budgets is likely to be October half term. We're going to drop one host and replace the other (continuing forward with 2 hosts again instead of 3) as they don't appear on the VMware compatibility matrix which I was advised to work off.

 

Until then, we have the capacity and redundancy built in to what has so far been a very stable platform so we're fairly happy continuing to stretch it out.

Edited March 13, 2018 by Cache

[kennysarmy]

Thanks for the replies.

[robjduk]

Im on 5.5 and plan on upgrading it when we do our servers early next year. Its been rock solid for the past 5 years so not worried. I did try to upgrade once but some SQL update failed and I lost the will to care anymore. Will sneek the price of the upgrade in with the server installation and setup.

[Achandler]

As far as I am aware, if you are on a support agreement you cna go to upto 6.0 as part of it (supported until 2020) but to go to 6.5 you have to pay VMWare for the privilege. For that you get support until 2021, hardly a massive difference.

[Cache]

I checked this with my supplier, providing your Support and Maintenance is upto date and active when the version was released, you can upgrade to the latest version. You might need to upgrade your licence key in the portal however.

[howartp]

We're going to look at it next Summer (2019).

 

Our hosts aren't compatible with 6.* so will need budgeting in.