Plain Virtualization

Recently have received few questions regarding vSphere Enterprise edition. As announced by VMware, vSphere Enterprise edition is no longer available for purchase from 30th Jun 2016. Details can be found from this KB . As this End of Availability (EOA) from vSphere 6.0, a customer who wants to upgrade to 6.5 or 6.7 or even vSphere.Next would ask how can I proceed. If you read from the KB: "Customers choosing not to upgrade their vSphere Enterprise or vSOM Enterprise licenses to Enterprise Plus and who remain active on SnS will continue to be entitled to future minor or major releases of these Enterprise editions if they are made available per the terms of their SnS agreement." As long you are on existing SnS, you are free to upgrade. So what it means, although vSphere Enterprise Edition is no longer available for purchase, there is still vSphere Enterprise edition for vSphere 6.5 and 6.7. This is not a software limitation. However, do note this is based on terms of ...

I get this so often and decide to just clear this up. In any ISV or software vendors where you purchase their software, the license received will always be the latest.  This applies the same for any VMware products. You won't want to purchase something from the market to find that it was 1 year ago right? So what if your environment is running an older version and you just acquire new licenses which are a newer version than yours when you want to scale? Don't worry, you can always go to your VMware license portal  and select a number of licenses that you want to downgrade to.  The version available is the Products version that is still supported. You can also upgrade your older version of the product to the later or latest version as long your licenses are still under Support & Subscription (SnS). At the time of writing, using vSphere version 5.5 is still supported so the lowest version will be 5.5.  This also to give you a reminder, never to run...