(Blogpost by Paul Turner, Vice President, vSphere Product Management, VMware)
18604 downloads of vSphere 8’s IA release with smooth installations and no escalations. That’s the results from 4 weeks of deployments and reflect well on vSphere 8’s overall quality. We’re really pleased to announce that vSphere 8 has now reached General Availability (GA) status.
Volume of vSphere 8 IA Downloads over time.
As we stated in our vSphere 8 Release Model blog, we are using the IA and GA designations to indicate adoption and usage of the product with our customers. The new IA is our fully tested, production quality release which has met all the release criteria – previously this would have a GA designation. Now, we designate the release as GA based on deployment experience with customers – an additional quality guarantee that never existed before. It allows customers who are slower to adopt to gain confidence that the product has seed time and proven customer deployments.
We also promised that “For every major release we will publish any information we find during the IA period to raise confidence that the release is proven in customer environments at scale.” We have created a tracking KB article which you can reference for any important known issues and workarounds – https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/90026
The quality has surpassed our expectations and we strongly recommend mass adoption of this release. There is no need to wait for an ‘update 1’ release like some do; you can have confidence that the product is deployed at scale in a broad set of real-world customer environments.
If you have delayed on your vSphere upgrades in the past, hopefully this sharing of real-world deployments will convince you to deploy and gain from all the features, improvements, and any security issues (a standard practice for our releases), which we have fixed in this release.
See below for reference information and useful links.
