Introduction
As we enter 2023 after the holiday season, and things are hopefully quiet and systems well behaved, we should take a moment to review what’s coming up with respect to VMware End of General Support.
Here’s a summary of the movements in VMware product line up in January and February 2023.
What's Going and When
The following table shows products leaving VMware General Support.
Date
Products
7th January 2023
VMware App Volumes 4 2012
15th January 2023
VMware Workspace ONE UEM Console 2105
16th January 2023
VMware Cloud Foundation 3.11 VMware SDDC Manager 3.11
18th January 2023
VMware vRealize Automation 8.6.2 VMware vRealize Orchestrator 8.6.2
31st January 2023
VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer 20.1.x VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Edition 1.13.0, 1.13.8, 1.13.9 VMware vRealize Orchestrator 7.6
8th February 2023
VMware Workspace ONE UEM Console 2107 (SaaS Only)
10th February 2023
VMware Skyline Collector 3.1
28th February 2023
VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.5
Infrastructure
A relatively quiet time with respect to infrastructure products. VMware Cloud Foundation (vCF) 3.11 and its associated SDD Manager are the last 3.x release, so upon retirement, version 4.0 is the earliest version remaining.
It should be noted that VMware End of General Support impacts several other products related to it:
- VMware vSphere 6.7 and vSAN 6.7 that left general support last year, remain supported as deployed as part of VCF 3.11 up to the end of VCF 3.11’s support on 16th
- NSX-V 6.4 has limited critical bug fixes up to the end of VCF 3.11’s support.
- VMware vRealize Automation 7 as a part of VCF also ends with VCF 3.11.
In networking and security, NSX Advanced Load Balancer 20.1.x is leaving VMware End of General Support, though this can be upgraded to more current releases (21.x or 22.x).
Monitoring, Management and Automation
The end of support for VMware vRealize Automation 8.6.2 (as released 18th January 2022) means that release 8.6 as a family will leave support. 8.7 and 8.8 remain in support, with the latter being the current release. VMware vRealize Orchestrator 8.6.2 runs essentially in parallel with Automation.
With respect to Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition, release 1.3.0 was previously granted an extension on support, while 1.13.8 and 1.13.9 were update releases expiring as expected. 1.13.10 was released in December 2022 and remains in support.
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.5 has been superseded by 1.6.
End User Compute
The End User Compute space is relatively quite with an App Volumes release dating back to the end of 2020 leaving VMware End of General Support. Numerous more recent releases have since replaced this, through to 2209, which includes VMware vSphere 8 support.
There are two different releases of VMware Workspace ONE UEM Console called out 2105 and 2107. These are 2021 releases and have been switched to the Enterprise Desktop & Mobility product lifecycle.
As described on VMware’s page on the topic, UEM Console has an 18 month life in General Support. Note that the 2107 is SaaS only – in this context, it depends on how WS1 was procured.
For example, where Workspace ONE was procured as a Shared Instance, it will have already been upgraded, while only dedicated instances have a measure of control over updates.
Conclusion
A relatively quiet start to the year after the somewhat higher tempo of VMware End of General Support products in the back end of 2022.
Of course, as always, before embarking on an upgrade of a product, check for interoperability between related products first.
