Oct 212018
 

VMware announced the end of availability for the vDP (vSphere Data Protection) product last year. In their release, it was mentioned that no more updates would be issued for the product.

At that time, I recommended to most customers to start planning to upgrade/migrate to a different product. VMware then released some ESXi and vSphere upgrades, but didn’t immediately update the vDP appliance. It appeared as though no more updates would be issued.

Due to the the previous announcement, and a lack of an updated vDP appliance, this increased the urgency of migrating to a different product.

However, just recently I noticed that VMware is still maintaining the vDP appliance for vSphere 6.5, so you can continue to use it while you plan your migration to a new Backup/DR product, and your upgrade to vSphere version 6.7.

 

Please note: I noticed the updates to the vDP appliance are being released later than the vSphere/ESXi updates. I wouldn’t upgrade your ESXi hosts to 6.5 certain update levels until the applicable vDP updated appliance is available for that version.