If you’re a VMware VSphere 5.5 user there is no doubt you would of heard of the news that the product terminate support as of the 19th September 2018. So if you do find yourself in this position what are your options and what actions should you take?
Do nothing
Believe it or not there’s plenty that do nothing to mitigate the risks of an out of support product. But what are the risks of doing nothing? Clearly once product is ‘out of support’ the vendor announces that they will no longer provide fixes or ‘patches’ to remedy any problems. This may go against many a privacy and security policy when it comes to protecting data. There’s also a performance issue to consider. The older a product gets the more likely it is to experience resilience and performance issues without the necessary updates and problem fixes. These problem all come at a cost. Cost of time to fix and download time. In many cases this risk is not a price worth paying.
Upgrade
VMware has created a number of ascension products to vSphere 5.5 in the form of 6.5. In theory upgrading is easy for anyone with and requires little intervention from. The usefully people at VMware have produced a training video on how this can be done.
Migrate
There’s plenty of other options to vShere 5.5. Some are cheaper, some provide greater scalablity, some offer greater resilience performance. Talk to your account manager to establish your options.
If you are a VMware vSphere 5.5. user and would like to discuss your options with an impartial infrastructure consultant, please contact us for an initial discussion.
