As we approach (northern hemisphere) summer, we once again visit VMware’s Product Lifecycle Matrix to review what’s coming to the end of general support – this time in May and June 2023. We have a relatively quiet May, with a bit of an uptick in June.
What's going end of general support when?
The following table shows products leaving general support:
Date
Products
11th May 2023
VMware Bitfusion 3.5
13th May 2023
Cloud Provider Lifecycle Manager 1.1
31st May 2023
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated Edition 1.14.0
9th June 2023
vRealize Automation 8.8.1
vRealize Orchestrator 8.8.1
22nd June 2023
Workspace ONE UEM Console 2109
30th June 2023
Avi Kubernetes Operator 1.7.x
Avi Multi Kubernetes Operator 1.7.x
SD-WAN 4.2 Edge
SD-WAN 4.3 Edge
SD-WAN 4.3 Orchestrator, Controller and Gateway
Infrastructure
In the sphere of core infrastructure, there are a couple of interesting items.
Following on from the last period’s end of support for VMware vSphere Bitfusion 3.0, as we suggested, 3.5 disappears in May, so it will definitely be 4.0 or 4.5 releases that came out from late 2021 onwards (the most recent being 4.5.2 in June of 2022) to remain in support.
Cloud Directory Availability is a disaster recovery solution for VMware Cloud Director. We have two releases of VMware Cloud Director Availability going end of support in June. An interesting one given that there is a five-month gap between release dates, though this may be explained by something visible in the Interoperability matrix showing a gap with respect to 4.3 support for the 10.4 releases of vCloud Director.
While upgrading to 4.5, the current release, is possible, the path is via 4.4 and care must be taken to ensure downstream compatibility with VMware vSphere is maintained.
VMware SD-WAN is a product that essentially extends software defined networking to WAN connectivity. The Edge components are appliances (physical and virtual) that provide site level connectivity, while the Orchestrator/Gateway/Controller element provides the core components. The Edge appliances, along with version 4.5 are subject to an extension to the end of technical guidance, though general support is ending as planned. Given that the last 4.x release leaves support in September, the recommendation would be to upgrade to either 5.0 or 5.1 that are supported into 2025. 5.1 supports direct upgrade from 4.x to 5.1.
Modern Apps Solutions
Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.14.0 is on an N-1 release cycle and leaves support at the back end of May. As you’d expect. 1.16.0, released at the end of February 2023 is the latest release, though the upgrade path in the release notes states that you need to be on 1.15.2 and earlier 1.15 patch releases.
Avi Kubernetes Operator is an operator which works as an ingress Controller and performs Avi-specific functions in a OpenShift/Kubernetes environment with the Avi Controller (now part of NSX Advanced Load Balancers). Although release 1.8 exists, this leaves support at the end of October, while 1.9 runs to the end of February 2024.
The Multi-Kubernetes equivalent supports multi-cluster applications. Releases run in parallel, with 1.9 being the latest release.
Monitoring, Management and Automation
Following on from last period, we have the 8.8.1 patch release of VMware vRealize Automation and Orchestrator being pulled from general support. These are subject to Enterprise Application Support Lifecycle Policy which states that support is either for two years following general availability of the major release or for 12 months for the latest (point) release following general availability of the next release.
Another under EAP terms is VMware Cloud Provider Lifecycle Manager 1.1. This was launched in 2021, so end of support is right on time. This product is used to automate deployment and configuration of VMware Cloud Director, Usage Meter, RabbitMQ and vRealize Operations Tenant App. The most recent release is version 1.4 (October 2022), though the in-place upgrade is via 1.3 and 1.2 incrementally, so if you’re planning to upgrade from 1.1, it will take a little planning.
End User Compute
The only EUC component this period is Workspace ONE UEM Console 2109. As a product, this is now subject to an 18-month support cycle, so this product, released in autumn 2021 is actually a little late leaving support. It should be noted that where VMware Workspace ONE Access has a corresponding release, the two generally run based on interoperability. The 21.08 release of Access goes end of support in September.
Conclusion
This brings us to the end of the May/June update. Stay tuned to the Blog for further news.