The End of General Support (EOGS) for vSphere 5.5 and vSAN 5.5 is September 19, 2018. To maintain a full level of Support and Subscription Services after this date, you will need to upgrade to vSphere 6.5. Upgrading to vSphere delivers 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.
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.
How to Upgrade
The upgrade of your environment to VMware vSphere 6.5 is performed in a phased manner. The components that are upgraded in earlier phases are fully compatible with components whose upgrades have not yet occurred.
- Perform the upgrade of the vCenter Server along with associated VMware Solutions
- Upgrade your vSphere hosts to VMware ESXi 6.5
- Install or Upgrade vRealize Log Insight for vCenter Server and vRealize Operations
- Post-Upgrade Considerations: Complete the upgrade of your virtual machines, Distributed Switches, and datastores
For more information about the upgrading process, attend this three-part webcast series: What You Ought to Know About Architecting a Seamless Upgrade to vSphere 6.
Learn More
For more information on the benefits of upgrading and details on how to upgrade, visit the VMware vSphere Upgrade Center. For detailed technical guidance, visit vSphere Central and the vSphere 6.5 Topology and Upgrade Planning Tool. For information about the partner impact, please visit Partner Central.
