By — Paul Turner, VP Product Management, Cloud Platform Business Unit, VMware

This month marks a full year that many businesses transitioned to a work from home model with the onset of the global pandemic. That’s created challenges for some of our customers with regards to IT operations and strategic planning. It has also led to uncertainty as to when your business operations will return to normal. We can help address some of your challenges by offering you both flexibility and continued support as we all work together to get to the other side of this pandemic.

Extension of VMware vSphere 6.5 General Support Period

To help you manage through the ongoing situation, we had previously extended the general support  period for vSphere 6.7 (read the blog post). Today we are extending the general support period for vSphere 6.5 by 11 months, to October 15, 2022. Originally, vSphere 6.5 was scheduled to reach EoGS (End of General Support) on November 15, 2021. The original EoTG (End of Technical Guidance) date of November 15, 2023 still applies for vSphere 6.5. There is no change in support dates for any other vSphere version.

In parallel, we are also extending the general support period for VMware vSAN 6.5 and 6.6. You can read all of those details here.

The longer vSphere 6.5 supportability period is intended to help you work through an uncertain time with worry-free stability and introduce an added buffer period for planning future upgrades as you resume regular operations moving forward.

Summary of Key Dates for vSphere 6.5

Product Version General Availability Existing EoGS Revised EoGS EoTG ESXi 6.5 November 15, 2016 November 15, 2021 October 15, 2022 November 15, 2023 (No Change) vCenter Server 6.5 November 15, 2016 November 15, 2021 October 15, 2022 November 15, 2023 (No Change)

Note: For vSphere 6.5 there is no plan for Extended Support after the end of general support. Extended Support will only be available on vSphere 6.7 – our final long-term support 6.x offering. Customers who will need vSphere 6.x support beyond October 15, 2022 should plan to move to vSphere 6.7 (or preferably move to vSphere 7).

Limitations for vSphere 6.5 extension of general support:

The caveats defined below are applicable for the updated vSphere 6.5 general support period. Deviations from this configuration or any other VMware supported configuration will be considered unsupported.

Please see https://www.vmware.com/support/policies/policy_index.html for VMware support policy details.

This special general support extension for ESXi 6.5 hosts will be offered with the below caveats:

• Major web browsers aligned their efforts to disable or stop running Flash applications around Dec 30, 2020. We recommend that you upgrade vCenter Server 6.5 instances to vCenter Server 6.7 and manage the ESXi 6.5 hosts using the upgraded vCenter Server 6.7 instances. vCenter Server 6.7 uses the HTML5-based web client as compared to Adobe Flash client in vCenter Server 6.5.
• • For hosts managed by vCenter Server Appliance, you need to upgrade vCenter Server to 6.7 Update 3 or later (to get feature parity of HTML5 UI): https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.7/com.vmware.vcenter.upgrade.doc/GUID-30485437-B107-42EC-A0A8-A03334CFC825.html.
  • For hosts managed by vCenter Server for Windows (in order to be able to use VMware Update Manager for subsequent upgrade of ESXi), you need to upgrade vCenter Server to 6.7 Patch 05 or later: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.7/com.vmware.vcenter.upgrade.doc/GUID-61D5BD40-5E7C-40E6-BDF1-4969370B8B09.html.
  • If you cannot upgrade, we advise that you maintain the browser compatibility for vSphere 6.5 Adobe Flash Client in your environment. Please see the Knowledge Base article https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/78589 for further details.

• The vCenter Server upgrade is subject to the upgrade matrix from vCenter Server 6.5.x to 7.0.x release line. Please see the Knowledge Base article at: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/67077.
• The extended general support excludes fixes requiring architectural changes as well as significant upgrades to 3rd party or open-source software.

If you have any questions about this announcement, please reach out to your VMware Representative, your VMware Reseller Partner, or contact VMware Support.

You can learn about the latest innovations and benefits of vSphere 7 on vSphere.com.

For information on inclusion and exclusion of terms in Extended Support please refer to https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/products/support/vmware-extended-datasheet.pdf

Please refer to this KB article https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/83223 for information on general support for vSphere 6.5 and vSAN 6.5/6.6.

For definition and scope of EoGS and EoTG please visit this website and blog.