With just over 100 days to go the vSphere 5.5 End of General Support is fast-approaching on September 19, 2018.

To maintain your full level of Support and Subscription Services, VMware recommends upgrading to vSphere 6.5 or 6.7. (Note that by upgrading to vSphere 6.5 or 6.7 you not only get all the latest capabilities of vSphere but also the latest vSAN release and capabilities.)

vCloud Suite 5 and vSphere with Operations Management (vSOM) customers running vSphere 5.5 are also recommended to upgrade to vSphere 6.5 or 6.7.

If you are unable to upgrade from vSphere 5.5 before EOGS and are active on Support and Subscription Services, you may purchase Extended Support in one-year increments for up to two years beyond the EOGS date. Visit VMware Extended Support for more information.

Why Upgrade

vSphere 6.5 provides a highly available, resilient, on-demand infrastructure that is the ideal foundation for any cloud environment. It offers innovation that will enable digital transformation for the enterprise, and makes the IT administrator’s job simpler, freeing up their time, so they can innovate rather than maintain status quo. vSphere 6.5 is also the foundation of VMware’s hybrid cloud strategy moving forward and is required for cross-cloud architectures. Some key new capabilities of vSphere 6.5 include:

• Simplified Architecture, Streamlined Operations – vCenter Server Appliance capabilities enhance your efficiency with REST-based APIs for simple automation, native built-in vCenter Server Appliance high availability, file-based backup and recovery, one-step migration with our vCenter Server Appliance Migration Tool, and unified patching of OS, vCenter Server and database.
• Modern User Interface – HTML5-based vSphere client for fast performance and ease of use.
• Comprehensive Built-In Security – vSphere Encryption and encrypted vMotion protects data at rest and in motion. Secure Boot prevents hypervisor and guest operating system tampering. Audit-quality logging provides superior forensic information to help understand who did what, when and where if security threats occur.
• Proactive Datacentre Management – Predictive DRS learns your environment and, based on usage patterns, pre-emptively rebalances workloads in advance of upcoming demands and spikes – eliminating resource contention before it occurs. Proactive HA anticipates hardware failure and leverages vSphere vMotion to redirect workloads to servers in good standing before a failure occurs.
• vSphere Integrated Containers – vSphere Integrated Containers delivers an enterprise container infrastructure that provides the best of both worlds for the developers and vSphere operations teams. It enables containers to be run side by side with virtual machines on the same vSphere infrastructure without any new tooling requirement.
• Advanced Processor Support – Increased scale enables support for any application. vSphere 6.5 supports the latest x86 chip sets, devices, drivers and guest operating systems.

Recommended Resources:

• Compare features and capabilities of vSphere 5.5, 6.0 and 6.5
• Top 10 reasons why you should upgrade to vSphere 6.5