Working from home is the future, yet VMware just extended vSphere 6.5 support for a year because remote upgrades are too hard

VMware has extended support for vSphere 6.5 and vCenter 6.5 by a year, and says it needs to do so because customers are struggling to upgrade while their teams work from home/live in their offices. News of the extension emerged in a Friday post by Paul Turner, veep for product management at VMware’s Cloud Platform Business …

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure this makes any sense. I installed ESXi 6.5 without leaving my home office, why should it be any more difficult than 6.7 or 7.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here have upgraded my 6.5 clusters to 6.7.

Later, after new hardware is put in (people needed on site for that), I will be getting them installed from home. That will be part of my automation project, baremetal deployment instead of doing it manually remotely.

[thondwe]

Imagine sites have either not invested in proper remotely accessible "Lights Out" kit (no excuse - I've got ILO running on my old HP server in the garage - i.e. not hard) or have secured the "out of band" network to the point of not having access remotely (reasonable security approach for an on premises centric view)

Either problem should have been fixed by now surely...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thing is, it's not even needed to upgrade your current clusters, add the image to vcenter update, create the baseline, attach to cluster, remediate.

[Nate Amsden]

Licensing and hardware support would be the biggest reasons(much more so for 7.0 than 6.7). 7.0 dropped official support for tons of hardware(and 6.7 isn't officially supported by a bunch of hardware too). And of course for orgs that have been running vmware for a while they may not have maintained their support contracts over the years which is required to get upgrades to 7.0 license keys. I know on more than one occasion I have gone to upgrade license keys only to get rejected saying the support was expired(support was through HP), and had to go to HP to get them to "sync" the system to get the vmware portal to recognize that support is current.

Still running vSphere 6.5 and vCenter 6.7 across my org, nothing in the newer versions compelling enough to upgrade (vCenter 6.7 only for the newer HTML client). Really miss the .NET client(saying that is weird given I've been linux on the desktop since 1998, and hated using .NET back when I first started using ESX 3 because of that, but it's so much better than the HTML and flash clients, except for 4k screen support found it unusuable on my laptop when I first tried out 4k a few years ago, but worked around it by switching laptop to 1080p).

Last vSphere release I was super excited about was 4.1. Everything since has been "nice, but not that exciting" which is good I suppose, nice stable product(I file less than 1 ticket/year on vmware issues with ~700-1000 VMs running).