In an announcement today by VMware, the company announced that its vFabric product line will continue to support Java 6 past the formal end of life (EOL) of Java 6 slated by Oracle to be in effect by February of 2013. This also includes a la carte support only contracts for Apache Tomcat and Apache HTTPD. Future versions of vFabric products will continue to be validated on Java 6 as well.
In VMware’s own words, this announcement for continued support for Java 6 means the following for customers:
vFabric customers that chose not to update their applications to Java 7, will still enjoy the same level of support from VMware for their vFabric middleware stack that powers their Java 6 applications, even past its end of life. It also means that Java 6 will continue to be a testing requirement for future versions of vFabric Suite. Customers not interested in updating their applications to Java 7, can continue to trust their vFabric upgrades from VMware.
For customers purchasing a la carte VMware support only for Apache Tomcat or combined support only for Apache Tomcat and HTTPD, they will not violate their support contract by continuing to run applications using Java 6”
The company also reminded customers that VMware does not provide direct support for Java 6 itself, but rather many of the world’s most popular products that run and manage Java 6 applications. The continued support for Java 6 will be available for both existing customers as well as future ones.
For more information on VMware’s recommendations on application modernization strategies, support and services, please refer to the full article on [blogs.vmware.com/vfabric].