As you may or may not know for a few years you have been entitled to unlimited usage of Suse Linux Enterprise Server for VMware as part of your VMware vSphere Licenses and Support and Subscription. This is the same Suse Enterprise Linux that everyone was used to, just distributed for VMware under and OEM agreement. This meant that in a vSphere environment you could use as much SLES as you wanted and get all the patches and updates you need for no additional charge over and above you existing VMware SNS. If you wanted phone support on top that was a very reasonable and small fee per host. Unfortunately for those of you didn’t know about this, or for whatever reason didn’t take advantage of this then you might miss out.

VMware has today announced through their vSphere Blog Article the end of availability for SLES for VMware. You have until 25th July to make use of the all you can eat entitlement to SLES for VMware. Any existing customers that are using it will be largely unaffected. The support period for existing customers will be through to August 25th, 2016. So this gives you a bit of time to find an alternative. The Register posted an article titled VMware Ends Free SUSE for vSphere Customers Offer, which also covers this announcement. I have been able to help a number of customers leverage this offer and in the process save hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I think the reason this offer was so great in the first place is that of the commercially supported versions of Linux SLES and RedHat were the most common and had the most ISV apps that you could run on them. This also meant your OS licensing costs would be far less when you virtualized Linux on vSphere, than potentially it would have been with other platforms. I often saw in the field that most organisations had an existing Linux agreement and that was often slow in changing, plus the move to SLES for VMware meant you had to actually use the SLES for VMware distribution and support codes, even though it was the same. This was often too time consuming for many organisations to be able to adopt.

Final Word

Seeing as VMware didn’t even support SLES for all of it’s own software, including vCloud Director, maybe the writing has been on the wall for some time. It’ll be interesting to see what replaces SLES as the OS of choice for VMware virtual appliances, and which OS options that VMware supports in the future. I you haven’t yet downloaded SLES for VMware and got your registration code for the patches and updates then now is the time to do it, before the July 25th deadline. As always your feedback and comments welcomed.

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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2014 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.