Just a little Public Service Announcement and reminder.  vSphere 5.0 and 5.1 end of general support is coming soon.  End of General Support for ESXi 5.0/5.1 along with vCenter 5.0/5.1 and ancillary products (SRM 5.0/5.1, Data Recovery 2.0, Update Manager 5.0/5.1) is set for 2016-08-28.

What does End of General Support mean?

General Support provides full support of the product, which includes:

• Phone Support
• Maintenance Updates
• Upgrades
• Bug and Security Fixes

So what happens to vSphere 5.0/5.1 now?

vSphere 5.0 and 5.1 now enter the technical guidance phase.  While phone support is not provided, help can be obtained through a self-help portal.  You can also still receive support and potential solutions for low severity problems.  You can get further details here.

So what should customers running 5.0/5.1 do?

I recommend customers should look to upgrade to vSphere 5.5 or 6.0.  If you have a valid support contract, it shouldn’t cost you anything to upgrade as far as licensing goes.  It’s important to verify your hardware is supported though, including:

• Servers
• Storage, whether it be a traditional storage array, or internal controller, or hyper-converged solution
• I/O cards
  • HBAs
  • NICs
• Third party products, such as
  • Backup products
  • Orchestration
  • Monitoring
  • VDI

While it’s not absolutely critical to upgrade exactly by 8/28/2016, plans should be made to upgrade.  You don’t want to handle that upgrade in a hurry!

Final tips

If you’re upgrading, be aware that you can mix ESXi versions with vCenter versions.  For this reason, if there’s a specific reason you can’t/don’t want to upgrade to ESXi 6.0, you can upgrade your hosts to 5.5, and run vCenter 6.0, assuming your other products are compatible with vCenter 6.  That might make it easier to upgrade to subsequent versions of vCenter or ESXI down the road.  You might want to consider the vCenter Appliance.

Happy upgrading!