At Broadcom, we are committed to bringing innovation and state of the art capabilities to our customers through our products, enabling our customers to provision, manage and optimize their private cloud environments. At the same time, we have listened to our customers over the years, and understand how much they value a stable and secure infrastructure. Even as more and more businesses have adopted the latest VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.x versions, some of them are in the process of planning their upgrades from VCF 4.x.
To enable customers with this transition and provide more flexibility, we have recently announced the extension of the general support period of VMware vSphere 7.x. Originally, vSphere 7.x was scheduled to reach End of General Support on April 2, 2025. With this announcement, the General support has now been extended to October 2, 2025. You can read more on this here – Announcing Extension of VMware vSphere 7.x and VMware vSAN 7.x General Support Period
While our goal is to provide more flexibility to the customers who are planning their transitions, there also are certain limitations that are applicable to this extension. The extension of this support will be offered with the below caveats:
During the period of extended General support, Broadcom will aim to resolve any critical open source vulnerabilities that might be reported. However, the ability to update open source components including upgrading to a higher open source package version depends on various factors including but not limited to availability of the patch upstream and whether the package version remains supported by its open source maintainers.
Broadcom does not represent or warrant there will be updates to all the open source vulnerabilities that might be reported. Broadcom reserves the right not to incorporate any bug fixes, security vulnerabilities or any other maintenance of the open source components even when the upstream may be available.
The last supported version of Kubernetes on VCF 4.x (vCenter 7.x) will be the minor version 1.28. Customers using the vSphere IaaS control plane should plan to move to vCenter 8.x prior to the End of General Support for Kubernetes v1.28 on May 28, 2025. Starting with vCenter 8.0 Update 3, the TKG Service can be upgraded independently to provide support for new Kubernetes versions.
vSphere 7.x included an embedded Harbor registry that could be enabled on a Supervisor for storing and sharing container images. The support for this embedded Harbor registry on vSphere 7.x will not be extended during the extended general support period. Customers who are using the embedded Harbor registry can choose one of the following options –
We hope this extension will help the teams plan their upgrades more efficiently and in a more seamless way. We look forward to you consuming our new features and capabilities and hearing about it from you.
If you have any further questions, please reach out to our support team. We also invite you to explore the capabilities of VCF 5.2 release
