Introduction
This post discusses the VMware products going end of General Support Nov-Dec 2022. Compared to September/October, the end of the year is relatively quiet, though there are a couple of interesting items.
What's going and when...
The following table shows products going end of General Support Sep-Oct 2022.
The information is taken from Product Lifecycle Matrix (vmware.com)
Date
Products
16th November
VMware Skyline Collector 3.0
19th November
vRealize Automation 8.6.1
20th November
Identity Manager 3.3.5
30th November
VMware Tanzu Toolkit for Kubernetes 1.3.0
14th December
VMware Tools 10.2.x
15th December
VMware HCX 4.3
16th December
vCloud Usage Meter 4.5
22nd December
Workstation 16 Pro and Workstation 16 Player
Fusion 12
31st December
VMware SD-WAN 4.2 Orchestrator, Controller and Gateway
VMware SD-WAN 3.4 Edge
VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.4
Desktop products
Just before Christmas, we see the end of General Support for VMware Workstation 16 (for Windows and Linux) and VMware Fusion 12 (For Mac). This is interesting as both products were still being marketed by VMware right up to mid-November.
Then, out of the blue, with little fanfare, Workstation 17 and Fusion 13 moved from Tech Preview to general release on 17th November. Phew! That was close. Of course, you’ll need to buy a new license, so if you value support, you’ll want to consider that, in less than a month, your version 16 will no longer be supported.
VMware Tools
VMware Tools 10.2, the last release of which was March 2018, leaves support in December. This is quite an old release – shipping with ESXi 6.0p7, ESXi 6.5U2 and ESXi 6.7 which are all out of support. Given these are installed in the Guest OS, from a security perspective, it is important to keep on top by deploying a more recent release.
Identity Manager 3.3.5
This is typically the vIDM that is deployed with vRealize solutions rather than the Workspace ONE flavour – Although they share a similar origin, they are not the same beast, diverging from 3.3 in 2019.
vIDM 3.3.5 was released in May 2021 (the closest Workspace ONE Access would be 20.10). It’s successor, 3.3.6, came out in January 2022 and can be upgraded to in most circumstances.
The other products ...
Of the other products listed, HCX is a regularly updated product with a relatively short support window, so upgrading is recommended in order to maintain supportability.
SD-WAN 4.2 has been superseded a number of times, the most recent being 5.0. This is a product where care must be taken to ensure that the components remain at a mutually supporting compatibility level – so ensure that the Orchestrator, Gateway and any Edges are checked.
Closing thoughts
As always, keep on top of your deployed products. If you’re out of support and hit an issue, it can make getting help more complicated – you’ll probably be asked to upgrade to a more recent release and upgrading a solution with an issue may exacerbate the issue. Much better to upgrade when the going is good.
Date
