vSphere 5.5 and vSAN 5.5 to go End Of General Support on September 2018

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vSphere 5.5 and vSAN 5.5 to go End Of General Support on September 2018

14th March 2018 vSphere 0


Time flies when you’re having fun, and it seems like only yesterday that I was upgrading vSphere 5.0 to 5.5 for a customer… Thinking back, this was late 2013, so over 4.5 years ago now!  With this in mind, I would like to remind you all that vSphere 5.5 and vSAN 5.5 go End Of General Support (EOGS) on September 19th 2018, so to retain your full level of Support and Subscription Services (SnS), you should think about upgrading to vSphere 6.5 (which is already on Update 1) to get the latest capabilities of vSphere and vSAN.

If you would like to see first hand what’s new in vSphere 6.5, then I would recommend looking at VMwares “What’s New with vSphere 6.5” Hands on Lab https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=vsphere-18-hol 

If you’re unable to upgrade from vSphere 5.5 for what ever reason, but have an active SnS, you can purchase extended support in one year increments for a maximum of two years after the EOGS date, so don’t panic, there’s still time and you can plan now so that you’re at least preparing for an upgrade. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/51491 

An overview of the benefits of upgrading can be found at the VMware vSphere Upgrade Center, the least of which is that vSphere 6.5 has extended support until November 2021.  If you’ve not used it, the vSphere 6.5 Topology and Upgrade Planning Tool is very cool and helps to simplify your plans to upgrade your current environment.   

You can find the product lifecycle of all VMware products below: 

https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/support/product-lifecycle-matrix.pdf