It’s that time of year again where we need to plan for the year ahead and be sure that any upcoming end-of-life or end-of-support dates from our dependent software vendors are addressed.

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 2024 so we can start planning our upgrades/migrations if necessary.

Veeam

Lets start with Veeam’s, products that have an end of fix or end of support within 2024. As a recap, Veeam have a three stage end-of-life process, detailed below:

Stage One: End of Fix

When a Veeam product reaches end of fix, no further updates/patches or hotfixes are created for this as the general rule. In extreme case-by-case circumstances, an exception may be made. But you can still engage with Veeam Support for assistance on this version.

Stage Two: End of Support

This is the sad stage we find ourselves approaching now, at this point, Veeam Support will no longer provide assistance for these versions. However, don’t panic, as long as you have an active maintenance agreement and support the new minimum requirements, you can upgrade to the newer versions of these products at no extra charge!

Secret Stage Three: End of Life

The not-so-secret stage three is that after end of support, Veeam may still have the end of support versions available to download for a while, but once they’ve been pulled, they’re officially at stage three, end of life. At this point, downloads can only be acquired on an exceptional case-by-case basis from Veeam.

To find out more about the Veeam Product Lifecycle, check out the dedicated page here.

With this out of the way, lets look at the products that will have an end of life in 2024.

End of Fix:

Veeam is widely expected to release a new version of Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 this year, I wrote about this during my V100 summit recap over on the community hub so if you missed it, here’s some details of what to expect with that upcoming release. At the time I wasn’t given any expectations other than 2024 so we’ll have to wait and see for this product’s availability.

Moving heavily into the realm of speculation, typically Veeam has released new versions of Veeam Backup for AWS/Azure/GCP around every 9 months or so for the past few releases, so as we just saw new editions I’d be surprised if we see major new releases before the end of September 2024, but I don’t have any dates on this one.

Likewise Salesforce, whilst only two versions in has seen a similar timescale of updates to Veeam Backup for AWS/Azure/GCP/M365 where it’s typically more than one release per 12 months, so I’d expect a v3 to release at some point in the year.

These aren’t too much of a concern however as, provided you have a valid support contract, you can upgrade should you encounter a bug.

I’ll end this section by highlighting that whilst the Veeam Data Platform’s Veeam ONE & Veeam Backup & Replication saw .1 release updates, this isn’t the case with AWS/Azure/GCP/Veeam Recovery Orchestrator and support has been impacted as a result. The following products are end of fix, effective now:

• Veeam Recovery Orchestrator v6
• Veeam Backup for AWS v6
• Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure v5
• Veeam Backup for Google Cloud v4.

End of Support:

This is where we can be more accurate, we have some dates given from Veeam specifically for the following products:

February 2024:

• Veeam Backup & Replication v11
• Veeam ONE v11
• Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV v3
• Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows v5
• Veeam Agent for Linux v5
• Veeam Agent for Mac v1

March 2024:

• Veeam Recovery Orchestrator v4
• Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v6

September 2024:

• Veeam Agent for Oracle Solaris v3
• Veeam Agent for IBM AIX v3

And a reminder, some of Veeam’s products list their end of Support as ‘Next GA Date + 1 version’, whilst Veeam’s product lifecycle page hasn’t yet been updated, I’ve had confirmation the following products are now end of support as of December 2023:

• Veeam Backup for AWS v5
• Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure v4
• Veeam Backup for Google Cloud v3

When Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v8 becomes available this year, we’ll also see Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v5 become end of support, though the amount of changes Microsoft have implemented since this product’s release, odds are you’ve upgraded or are upgrading already.

Microsoft

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.

This year I’ve opted to add an extra list, detailing all of the products moving into extended support from mainstream support, as this has happened so early in the year people might’ve missed it:

9th January 2024:

• Exchange Server 2019
• Hyper-V Server 2019
• SharePoint Server 2019
• Windows Server 2019
• Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2019

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 2024 are:

The only VMware product that Veeam integrates with reaching EoTG in 2024 is VMware Tools 10.2.x which will reach EoTG on the 14th December 2024.

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.

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 2024 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 23.10, which ends support in July 2024.

No LTS builds supported by Veeam have an end of life date in 2024.

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 be supported by Debian’s Security Team through to the 30th June 2024. If you’re using Debian 10, as of 1st August 2022, this passed into the LTS team which will drop support for this on the 30th June 2024. At this point the only first-party supported Debian build will be the Debian 12.x branch.

Fedora

Every release of Fedora is supported for 13 months, meaning every version of Fedora currently supported will become end of life in 2024. The currently supported versions of Fedora in 2024 are 36, 37, 38, and 39. Unfortunately, as of the time of writing, Fedora 38 & 39 are the only versions still supported by Fedora.

The rapid release cycle of Fedora makes it a poor candidate for production environments due to the detail provided above, and Fedora Linux 38 will reach end of life on the 14th May 2024, and Fedora 39 will reach end of life on the 7th December 2024.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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.

The following RHEL versions will reach end of life in 2024:

• RHEL 8.2 – Update Services for SAP Solutions – 30th April 2024
• RHEL 8.6 – Extended Update Support transitioning to Update Services for SAP Solutions – 31st May 2024
• RHEL 8.9 – Minor Release – 31st May 2024
• RHEL 8 – Full Support Ends 31st May 2024
• RHEL 9.0 – Extended Update Support transitioning to Enhanced Extended Update Support/Update Services for SAP Solutions – 31st May 2024
• RHEL 9.3 – Minor Release – Estimated May 2024
• RHEL 9.4 – Minor Release transitioning to Extended Update Support – Estimated November 2024

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.

Update: Thank you Mikhail /@n176053 on Twitter for pointing out that CentOS 7 goes End of Life on the 30th June 2024!

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 15.5 will reach end of support in December 2014, this is the only version of openSUSE 15.x supported in 2024 until the availability of openSUSE 15.6, which has been confirmed to be in development but no timescales have been provided for this release yet beyond an estimate of June 2024.

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.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 will reach an end of General Support for SP5 on the 31st October 2014, beyond this to remain on SUSE 12 you require LTSS.

The SLES 15 branch currently has no support changes announced in 2024, however based on the typical cadence of releases we could expect SLES 15 SP6 to be released in the summer of 2024, meaning that SLES 15 SP5 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 2024, 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 there is only the 6.5.x support branch under LTS support, 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 2024, and a continuous upgrade cycle will need to be followed to retain support. At the time of writing 6.7 is the latest release which, based on previous release cycles, we should expect 6.8 to be released in the next month or two, but this is speculation.

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 2024. More information available here.

Oracle Database

There are multiple Oracle Database versions currently under general support, these are the 23c Long Term Release, the 21c ‘Innovation Release’ which will leave support on the 30th April 2024, and the 19c ‘Long Term Release’. Both Long Term Releases will continue to be supported beyond 2024.

Oracle Linux

This year is more eventful for Oracle Linux, as we shall see Oracle Linux 6 expire its extended support, and Oracle Linux 7 transition from Premier Support to Extended Support in December 2024.

The current versions of Oracle Linux in Premier Support at the time of writing 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 7.3 TL0 is due to end support on the 31st December 2024.

The AIX 7.2 and 7.3 branches will remain in support through 2024, 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.