VMware 5.5 EOL - Recommended New Version

[gdavid16]

What is Veeam's recommendation for a vmware version/build above 5.5?
We want to upgrade our vmware environment to avoid being on an end of life version. is there a version that is working stable for anyone on veeam 9.5 update 2.

Does veeam have enough pull to have vmware delay the 5.5 end of life being that backups are critical to the vmware infrastructure and veeam has a solid market share of the vmware backup market?

[PTide]

Hi,

May I ask you why not 9.5 U3?

Thanks

[Gostev]

Does veeam have enough pull to have vmware delay the 5.5 end of life being that backups are critical to the vmware infrastructure and veeam has a solid market share of the vmware backup market?

Hi, can you please clarify a little bit how it helps your backups if VMware does not end of life 5.5? I am not sure if I follow you here.

Other than that, you are correct:
- Over half of all VMware customers use Veeam
- As of today, approx. 20% of Veeam customers are still on vSphere 5.5

[PTide]

I guess that George must have meant "General Support Phase" phase (end of life is still a couple of years away).

[gdavid16]

@PTide - yes i was talking about General Support Phase, but that includes security and bug fixes. it also only allows web support tickets.
We wouldn't leave our production environment like that for long.

@gostev, if they don't end of general support they would be on the hook for security, bug, and priority phone support tickets, and we wouldn't upgrade till things got a bit more stable, this in turn would leave our backups status quo for now.

[gdavid16]

@gostev - can you post a compatibility list? it would be great to see vmware version / known issues with veeam. that way we can pick our poison.

One of our vendors have suggested VMware 6.5 Update 1.
which seems to line up with your emails, i dont recall seeing anything about 6.5 Update 1.

from your emails:
Vmware 6.5 Update 2
Long story short, we're getting users who already jumped vSphere 6.5 U2 reporting more and more issues on top of those we have already found in our own testing. So please avoid upgrading to 6.5 U2 until we had a chance
to investigate those with the affected customers. The bad news is that according to one of the forum posts, you can end up with 6.5 U2 by simply using vSphere Update Manager (VUM) to install security patches – so be
careful not to upgrade to 6.5 U2 unintentionally.

Vmware 6.7
And I would actually go as far as saying that at this time, vSphere 6.7 support timeline is much more predictable on our side than one of 6.5 U2. While we've ran into a number of different issues with both, we did put much
more time and effort into 6.7 by now

[Gostev]

The majority of our customers are using vSphere 6.5 U1, so indeed this is the safest choice at this time.

[gdavid16]

Thanks.

[johnlong]

Is 6.5 U1 still the safe choice?

[Gostev]

Absolutely.

[skrause]

I just finished upgrading all of our environments to 6.5U1 from 5.5 and have had no issues. (We are using Veeam 9.5u3a)

[bovie2k]

I'm on 6.7 and now have the new hotadd hotfix in place with veeam 9.5 update 3a and it seems to be working great.