If you have a VMware environment with vSphere 6.5 or 6.7, the end-of-life is 15th October 2022 so you need to upgrade urgently. Running EOL versions of vSphere (or any other critical software) would be automatic non-compliance with Cyber Essentials, as all your software and hardware must be within a current lifecycle and receive vendor support. Additionally, you’ll be at increased risk from cyber attack or business downtime.
Unfortunately it’s not a simple upgrade for all customers. The storage requirements have changed for ESXi v7.x meaning that the installation should now be performed on traditional media with better write endurance – such as SSDs or HDDs.
Historically vSphere 6.5/6.7 solutions are deployed to SD card media, so in this case investment in new hardware is required along with a complete reinstall / setup of ESXi. This may be further complicated by installations of this era simply not being equipped with the correct hardware (RAID controller, drive backplane, etc.) in ESXi hosts to simply add drives in the traditional manner. Some hosts out there don’t have any free PCI-e slots available to install a RAID or BOSS controller. Ultimately you’re looking at £600-£1200 per server minimum to get it to ESXi v7. We will need to assess each environment individually to be specific about costs and what’s possible.
Nexus Engineer Graham Gray
The version upgrade is therefore likely to be more than a simple out-of-hours run of the latest installer.
If you have a VMware virtual machine environment that hasn’t been reviewed or upgraded recently, check the vSphere version. You can read the vSphere 7 launch blog on VMware’s website.