Complementing my last post highlighting the Veeam software releases reaching end of support in 2023, I’m once again providing an expanded list of software that Veeam works with, that will be approaching end of life in 2023.

Why does this matter when I’m just trying to protect the data?

Times change, and software changes with them, until it’s no longer supported. At any point, a patch to an operating system, a .NET framework update, or anything else really, could end up with the software no longer being backed up properly, or not working at all in production. Without valid support there’s no process to get a fix, and whilst your backup software may still be in support with Veeam, if the vendor won’t fix the problem, it’s time to start panicking.

With this in mind, let’s explore the software & operating systems being declared end of life in 2023 so we can start planning our upgrades/migrations if necessary.

Microsoft

We may as well start with one of, or potentially the largest software vendor in the world. Microsoft have many software lifecycles that they manage, however I’m just focusing on the ones that are supported directly with Veeam via some form of integration or operating system.

Microsoft have their standard, or “mainstream” support offerings which include new features, and their “extended” support which includes only security fixes. This list is focused on releases that are approaching the end of their extended support.

For more information on the specifics of the Microsoft products approaching end of life, be sure to check out Microsoft’s Documentation.

Microsoft also have a great export tool you can use to get lifecycle information based on family, group, and support dates. Available here.

VMware

VMware offer multiple stages of end of life, these are:

End of General Support

This is the stage we’ll care about. Once a product is End of General Support (EoGS), it will no longer receive any updates, or support for new hardware as examples.

End of Technical Guidance

After the EoGS, VMware migrate to End of Technical Guidance (EoTG) and will recommend self-help and provide best effort support for low criticality issues to provide workarounds when using a supported configuration. VMware only recommend using their products in this stage in very specific use cases.

End of Availability/End of Distribution

Once the End of Technical Guidance has been reached, the product is no longer available from VMware to purchase or download.

Which one do we care about?

Although Veeam perform best efforts to support products for a little while after their EoGS, this becomes a lower priority and can result in reduced feature availability vs a fully supported platform. For example, Veeam CDP leverages the VMware vSphere APIs for IO Filtering (VAIO), this was made available within vSphere 6.0 U1, however Veeam don’t support CDP on any versions less than vSphere 6.5. The VMware products that Veeam integrates with that reach EoGS in 2023 are:

For more information on the VMware Product Lifecycle Policy, including what support VMware will provide you at each stage, click here. If you want to check the list of complete product lifecycle page, click here.

Linux

This is one of the more complicated categories to attempt to provide information on, so I’ll be sticking to the major distributions with significant user bases, if I don’t mention the version you’re using unfortunately you’ll have to do your own research but please let me know and I’ll consider adding it to a future list.

Ubuntu

Canonical offer two different versions of their Ubuntu platform, interim releases, which are only supported for 9 months, which doesn’t make sense from a stability perspective, or their long-term support (LTS) builds.

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (and all related 18.04.x LTS builds) reach the end of standard support in April 2023, with Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) being your only option for continued support on this release branch after this date.

As Ubuntu provide LTS builds every two years, their interim releases are provided every 6 months and have 9 months support, therefore if you’re on a non-LTS build, your support has either already expired or will expire in 2023 if you don’t upgrade to the newest LTS or interim build available at the time. At the time of publication, the latest non-LTS version is Ubuntu 22.10, which ends support in July 2023.

Debian

Debian have a slightly different approach to standard support vs LTS, standard support has updates provided by the Debian Security Team whilst the LTS releases are maintained by separate volunteers and companies that wish to support this project, more information here.

As such we should focus on releases supported directly by the Debian Security Team, of which Debian 11 will still be supported by Debian’s Security Team through to at least July 2024. If you’re using Debian 10, as of 1st August 2022, this passed into the LTS team.

Fedora

Every release of Fedora is supported for 13 months, meaning every version of Fedora currently supported will become end of life in 2023. The currently supported versions of Fedora in 2023 are 36 which has an end of support date of the 16th May 2023. Unfortunately, as of the time of writing, Fedora 36 is not supported officially by Veeam Agent for Linux according to the helpcenter documentation.

The rapid release cycle of Fedora makes it a poor candidate for production environments due to the detail provided above.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has a quiet year for end-of-life announcements, with only one Extended Update Support (EUS) ending for RHEL 8.4. For more information on the RHEL lifecycle, read on.

Presently, there are three versions of RHEL under some element of support.

RHEL 7 remains under Maintenance Support Phase 2 until 2024, with an Extended Life Cycle Support add-on available to keep support until 2026.

RHEL 8 and RHEL 9 benefit from a simplified maintenance support program, which is simply Maintenance Support, and then Extended Life Cycle Support. This should be elaborated further to highlight that there is still a certain requirement to remain on the latest ‘minor’ version release to retain support. For those that leverage the Extended Update Support Add-On (details here) it is possible to remain on the same minor release for 24 months from its original release, this is only for specific releases, Red Hat retain a list of these versions here.

CentOS

CentOS now lives on as CentOS Stream 9, existing as an upstream branch to RHEL on a rolling support release, making production use increasingly unlikely as businesses would likely prefer paying for RHEL. Veeam will only grant this ‘experimental’ support (KB here) due to the rolling nature of the Operating System, but it’s still a downstream of Fedora with validated code being provided, I take this as a positive that if anything breaks in CentOS by design, it gives Veeam more time to resolve prior to reaching the next RHEL minor release.

openSUSE

The openSUSE project have two separate branches, openSUSE Leap and openSUSE Tumbleweed. openSUSE Tumbleweed is a rolling release which has no end of support date, provided you’re running the latest packages, this is supported by Veeam Agent for Linux. Whilst openSUSE Leap is the name given to openSUSE’s regular releases.

openSUSE 15.4 will reach end of support in November 2023, this is the only version of openSUSE 15.x supported in 2023 until the availability of openSUSE 15.5, which has been confirmed to be in development but no timescales have been provided for this release yet.

SLES

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server has a clear-cut support cycle documented handily here. SUSE have two tiers of support, General Support and Long Term Service Pack Support (LTSS), with the key differences being that LTSS does not include any software enhancement requests or hardware enablement.

LTSS is an optional additional purchase that extends support for another three years beyond the end of General Support. More information is available here.

In 2022 we saw the total end of support for the SLES 11 platform. SLES 12 SP4 will end LTSS support on the 30th June 2023, though the SLES 12 platform will still receive support provided you’re using SLES 12 SP5.

The SLES 15 branch currently has no support changes announced in 2023, however based on the typical cadence of releases we could expect SLES 15 SP5 to be released in the summer of 2023, meaning that SLES 15 SP4 would reach end of General Support towards the end of 2023, potentially the start of 2024.

These dates are the same when using SLES for SAP Applications.

macOS

Apple have kept to an annual release cycle for a number of years now, though this isn’t an officially documented policy, just like their lifecycle policy for updates. Apple tend to provide security updates for the latest version of their OS and the previous two versions. This makes the oldest version macOS 11, which will by this logic, end support when the next version of macOS is released in 2023, this is not definite however.

This statement above should be taken as a general guidance and not concrete, in recent years we’ve seen fewer security updates for older macOS versions still within this lifecycle, depending on severity. Therefore, it still makes sense to be on the latest macOS release supported.

Nutanix AOS

Nutanix offer both Short Term Support (STS) and a Long Term Support (LTS) options. The STS release is supported for 3 months after the release of the next version, for troubleshooting. Whereas the LTS release is supported with maintenance for 3 months after the release of the next version, followed by 9 months of troubleshooting.

Presently there are two LTS builds under support from Nutanix, the 5.20.x branch, for which support ends July 2023, and the 6.5.x support branch, which currently has no end of maintenance or support life dates announced yet, and won’t be announced until the release of the next LTS version.

As for the STS versions, as these are released on a regular cadence, no versions exist presently that will be supported throughout 2023, and a continuous upgrade cycle will need to be followed to retain support.

As a result, if you’re still on a 5.x release, an upgrade path to 6.x should still be planned. Some newer Veeam data protection features require 6.x to function, more information here.

Oracle

Oracle offer up to three support phases for their products, Premier Support, Extended Support and Sustaining Support.

Extended Support isn’t always offered unless a long-term support branch of the product is available and is a paid for extra.

Premier Support is the standard production support that Oracle offer for their latest versions and products, this support period typically includes patches of all severity, certification with third-party products/versions and other Oracle products in addition to other privileges such as support directly with Oracle.

Extended Support is an optional purchased option, at this stage, new third-party products are no longer certified nor are new hardware configurations, but this is otherwise similar to Premier Support.

Should your Extended support window expire or you opt to not purchase any Extended support, you migrate to the Sustaining Support. Sustaining Support allows for access to existing patches from the Premier Support period and Oracle support access, but new patches are no longer provided generally.

Solaris

There are three currently supported versions of Oracle Solaris: 10, 11.3 and 11.4. 11.4 is the only version available that is covered by Oracle Premier Support, so unless you have an Extended Support contract, this is the version you should aim to be on. There are no versions of Oracle Solaris moving from Premier to Extended or Extended to Sustaining within 2023. More information available here.

Oracle Database

There are multiple Oracle Database versions currently under general support, these are the 21c ‘Innovation Release’, and the 19c ‘Long Term Release’. Other than this, if you have a Custom Market Driven Support Contract, you could have this for Oracle Database 12.1.0.2, or 11.2.0.4, with a unified end of support date of the 31st December 2023.

Oracle Linux

There are no versions of Oracle Linux due to transition from Premier Support to Extended Support or Extended Support to Sustaining Support in 2022, the current versions of Oracle Linux in Premier Support are Oracle Linux 7, Oracle Linux 8, and Oracle Linux 9, whilst Oracle Linux 6 is in Extended Support. More information available here.

IBM AIX

Only the IBM AIX 7.x platforms are still under support at present, AIX 7.1 TL5 is due to end support on the 30th April 2023, bringing an end to support for the AIX 7.1 branch.

The AIX 7.2 and 7.3 branches will remain in support through 2023, with the only caveat being that for 7.2 you need to be on TL5.

All of the above versions mentioned are supported by Veeam Agent for IBM AIX.

IBM AIX Support Lifecycle information available here.