VI3 Extended Support

Sorry to keep going on about VI3 but I alluded to the end of General Support in a previous post and thought it might be nice just to expand on it a bit.

VMware explain their support lifecycle policies here and basically the clock started ticking for VI3 support the day that vSphere went GA. VI3 moves into extended support on 21st May 2010. That's only 4 months away.

So what does Extended Support mean? This is VMware's definition:

New hardware platforms are no longer supported, new guest OS updates may or may not be applied, and bug fixes are limited to critical issues. Critical bugs are deviations from specified product functionality that cause data corruption, data loss, system crash, or significant customer application down time and there is no work-around that can be implemented.