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VMware delays vSphere 6.7 end of life by 11 months, because vAdmins have other things to worry about

And teases pay-by-credit-card options for its AWS service

VMware has extended the supported life of vSphere 6.7 for 11 months.

vSphere 6.7 was launched in April 2018 and was due to exit general support on November 15th, 2021. Which meant planning for an upgrade to the new vSphere 7.0 probably needs to start reasonably soon.

But VMware appears to have recognised that plenty of vAdmins are a little busy right now. Paul Turner, veep for product management at Virtzilla’s Cloud Platform Business Unit, on Thursday wrote “many customers have reached out to share how their businesses have been impacted by Covid-19”. The gist of those conversations is that customers would love get busy planning for their next upgrades, but right now they’re just a bit busy coping with a global pandemic and the prospect of an upgrade to important infrastructure just isn’t welcome.

Hence the extension of VMware’s most luxurious support offering to October 15, 2022.

vSphere 6.7 will still be friendless come November 15, 2023.

But vSphere users may soon have other options to contemplate anyway as VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger yesterday told the Bank of America 2020 Global Technology Conference that he plans “lower end offerings” for VMware-on-AWS.

Gelsinger described them as “shorter-term credit card-based solutions” that VMware hopes will increase adoption of the offering. Gelsinger said “we just don't have that many customers yet” for the service, so easier-to-acquire and smaller-scale products may help.

Those remarks stand in contrast to VMware’s generally-bullish view of its AWS alliance, which it proudly said scored triple-figure growth during its Q1 earnings call.

Gelsinger also told the conference that he thinks the desktop virtualisation market has potential to double thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and that VMware will be content if its staff come to the office one day a week in the future.

VMware’s had a busy week, having also turned its July 2019 acquisition of Bitfusion into new GPU virtualisation capabilities. Big brother Dell joined in the fun with pre-packaged hardware brim-full of GPU goodness and ready to have the accelerators doled out the vLadle. The company also found time to open its chequebook to buy security outfit Lastline. ®

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