VMware NSX Network Detection and Response - FAQ: Ubuntu Bionic 18.04.6 LTS End of Standard Support , Extended support for Bionic appliances, and Focal upgrade timeline

Products

• VMware

Issue/Introduction

The NSX NDR Hosted and On-Premise appliances running the Ubuntu Bionic 18.04.6 LTS Operating System (OS), are reporting on the CLI, that the Hardware Enablement Stack is supported until June 2023. Additionally for customers who are monitoring the underlying Ubuntu OS support lifecycle on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases, the "End of Standard Support" for 18.04.6 shows in June 2023.

This article provides answers to frequently asked questions about the NSX NDR standalone product running the Bionic distribution and what VMware's timeline is for supporting our customers.
 

Who should read this? 

All Customers running an NSX NDR Hosted and On-Premise appliance which is running the Ubuntu Bionic 18.04.6 release of the operating system.

Customers who are running prior OS versions such as Xenial or Trusty distributions are already out of standard support by Canonical and the product is no longer supported by VMware, per the lifecycle.vmware.com policy. Installations on these older versions may run but will no longer be supported.
 

When will the distribution upgrade to Ubuntu Focal 20.04 be available? 

The VMware product and engineering teams are working diligently on upgrading the system components to make the Focal upgrade possible.
As of Hosted version 24.1, new sensor (version 1380) installations use Ubuntu Focal as the base OS. The upgrade of existing Bionic sensors to Focal will be supported as of Hosted 24.2, scheduled for the second half of 2024.

The next major On-Premises release (10.0) will support Focal as the base OS for on-prem installations for fresh installations and as an upgrade. It is scheduled for the second half of 2024.

Additional updates will be posted on this KB, please Subscribe to this KB article for updates on this timeline.
 

Until the new Focal release is available, what can I expect to happen after June 2023 Ubuntu End of Standard Support (EOSS)? How do I ensure my Bionic appliances receive security updates?

The VMware engineering and product teams have worked with Canonical and have release a new product version to add Expanded Security Maintenance (ESM) repositories to the latest NSX NDR appliances running Bionic 18.04.6. The ESM repositories add security maintenance for software packages shipped with Ubuntu Bionic and enable the latest versions of the appliance to receive ESM updates for critical CVE’s.

The below versions are available for customers to upgrade and published in Release Notes :

• Hosted 2023.1.2 - GA was on May 23, 2023 with the 2023.1.2 release which introduced appliance version 1360
• On-Premise 9.7.3 - GA was on May 30, 2023 with the 9.7.3  release which introduced appliance versions 1140.3 (for Manager, Engine, Data Nodes) and 1334 (for Sensors)

Customers should upgrade to these versions as soon as possible so that ESM security patches can be delivered to Bionic-based appliances. For customers already running Bionic with Auto-Update enabled, the new version will be automatically installed. If you have Auto-Update disabled you can manually upgrade the appliance versions using the Batch Upgrade button.

VMware Support will continue to support customers running these ESM Bionic versions of appliances until the Focal release is made available.
 

What action do I need to take in order to upgrade once the new Focal OS release is available? 

We will communicate instructions on the upgrade process from Bionic to Focal for NSX NDR appliances once the process is defined and QA'ed by VMware via Release Notes. We will post a new Knowledge Base article outlining the upgrade process once the upgrade is available also.

Until the Focal release is available, please upgrade to the latest Bionic versions above mentioned above or more recent to receive ESM updates.

What if I have more questions about this transition? 

Please open a ticket with VMWare Technical Support so we can help. 

Additional Information

Note: This article is applicable to the standalone VMware NSX Network Detection and Response product (formerly Lastline) and is not intended to be applied to the NSX NDR feature of NSX-T.