End of Availability (EOA) for vSphere Bitfusion

Products

• VMware

Issue/Introduction

VMware is announcing the End of Availability for vSphere Bitfusion, effective May 5^th, 2023. As a result, you will no longer be able to purchase new licenses of the product as of May 5^th, 2023. All support and maintenance are unaffected and will continue as per the Bitfusion Lifecycle through the published support period for Bitfusion 4.5.x to May 5^th, 2025. 
 

• End of Availability: May 5^th, 2023
• End of General Support: May 5^th, 2025

As a vSphere Bitfusion customer, how does this affect me and what are my next steps?
 
The End of Life (EOL) process for Bitfusion extends the support available until May 5^th, 2025. This means that if you are on active support, you will be able to continue to get support up until that date.
 
VMware recommends you review your Bitfusion-based solutions and use one of the alternative solutions, DirectPath I/O or VMware + NVIDIA AI-Ready Enterprise Platform.

At the end of support date, do I need to shut down Bitfusion?
 
If you are a perpetual license holder, you can choose to continue to run Bitfusion beyond the end of support date, however both General Support and Technical Guidance end on May 5^th, 2025. There will be no patches or maintenance updates provided after May 5^th, 2025.

VMware recommends you review your Bitfusion-based solutions and use one of the alternative options.

1.    Direct Path I/O: Direct Path I/O is an included feature of vSphere and applies to PCIE devices generally, not just GPUs. Please visit here to learn more. 

2.    VMware + NVIDIA AI-Ready Enterprise Platform: VMware + NVIDIA AI-Ready Enterprise Platform provides a best-in-class end-to-end AI-Ready infrastructure for enterprise IT and enables IT admins to deliver an AI-Ready infrastructure on which data scientists can deliver and scale AI and ML projects and help organizations scale modern workloads on the same vSphere infrastructure they have already invested in. For more details, please go to the VMware AI/ML webpage . 

What is happening to Project Radium?
 
In VMworld 2021, VMware announced Project Radium which has been a VMware innovation project.  In VMware Explore 2022, VMware announced Preliminary Performance of Project Radium. VMware will continue Project Radium as an innovation project without any decision made yet as  to whether to productize it or not.


If you need technical assistance, please contact your VMware account team and [email protected].

Resolution

https://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/ai-ml.html