In an effort to maintain the service and deliver on the features necessary, we had notified everyone earlier that we are changing the support/interop policies going forward. A couple of changes taking place soon are:

1. Usage Meter 4.4 will no longer have general support from May 4, 2022
2. Price protection for legacy bundles will end on June 30, 2022. So from that day onwards, all usage will be Flex related

What does this mean for you?

1. With Usage Meter 4.4 going End of General Support, now is a great time to move to Usage Meter 4.5. You can read this blog post to understand all the benefits of upgrading. Starting with Usage Meter 4.3 (which had gone End of General Support in November 2021), VMware has started listing an End of Technical Guidance date for each version. This means that when a Usage Meter version reaches End of Technical Guidance, it will no longer be processed by Usage Insight. VMware’s standard of 1 year after End of General Support will mark the date that a Usage Meter will no longer be viable for report generation.

How does this affect partners today?
This means that Usage Meter 4.3 will no longer be processed starting November 2022 and Usage Meter 4.4 will no longer be supported starting May 2023. But, thanks to in-place upgrades a partner can upgrade to Usage Meter 4.5 now to be proactive and avoid complications later on.

2. On June 30, 2022, the Price Protection for legacy bundles will end. This will have repercussions for those partners who were covered under the price protection.

What should those specific partners do?
The following steps are recommended to be done immediately. Do not wait, do not delay. Perform now.

1. Download the Usage Meter 4.5 appliance
2. Deploy a new Usage Meter 4.5 appliance to replace 3.6.1
3. Register the Usage Meter 4.5 in Test Mode first
4. Either manually connect to all of your products, or use the migration script to register all of the same products to the new Usage Meter (select Usage Meter 4.5 in the product version section after landing on the page from this link)
5. The following month, change the Usage Meter 4.5 registration to Production Mode

Other Important Reminder

Since UM 3.6.1, UM 4.1, and UM 4.2 are officially no longer supported in any capacity, the PUG was updated to reflect that UM 4.4 and higher are required by partners for monthly reporting. Ideally, migrate to UM 4.5 to save yourself the hassle of upgrading again soon. This also means that since UM 4.X requires Usage Insight, then automatic reporting and Usage Insight are required.

That is all there is to this update. If you need any additional assistance or guidance, take a look at the following options: