VMware appears to have made a concession to European regulators by extending the life of its low-end vSphere Standard and Enterprise Plus products. The virtualization pioneer quietly announced the extension in the November 4 blog post in which it announced a new low-end product called vSphere Express , which The Register reported yesterday. We based our report about vSphere Express on an interview, and on material provided by VMware – which sent a version of the blog post linked to above. The version we saw did not include the following paragraph, the contents of which were not mentioned in our interview:
“Furthermore, for customers in countries in the European Economic Area, vSphere Standard version 8 and vSphere Enterprise Plus version 8 will remain available for sale until October 31, 2027, and will have Extended Support included in any active subscriptions to those offerings until the earlier of the applicable subscription end date or October 31, 2028.” The latter date is more than a year past the October 11, 2027, end-of-general-support date for the more capable vSphere 8 and Cloud Foundation 5. x products. “This has the potential to be a positive development for organisations within the European Economic Area,” independent analyst Michael Warrilow told The Register . “It could provide them up to an extra 12 months to transition vSphere 8 to VCF 9 and/or migrate workloads to another platform.” Warrilow thinks European users should seek “absolute clarity” from VMware about the specifics of its offer. “What level of extended support will be provided and what longer-term commitments will need to be made? I cannot find any of that detail,” he wrote…