Product Life Cycle
The vPlus product Support Life Cycle phases are described here:
Technical Support depends on the service level included in your vPlus license agreement.
vPlus may choose, as an intermediate measure, to address serious issues that have an impact to customer business with a hotfix, while a vPlus Bug Fix Advisory is created and verified.
Life Cycle Dates
The vPlus Product Support Life Cycle dates are described here:
vPlus Life Cycle
Full Support Phase:
During the Full Support phase, qualified Critical and Important Security issues will be addressed with released High Priority Bug Fix as they become available. Other Fix Advisories, may be delivered as appropriate.
For any minor release made available during this phase, the available and qualified Fix Advisories will be cumulatively included with the contents of previously released product updates. This means that if a customer is running an older version of the product and reports a bug, that bug will be fixed in the latest version of the software and a customer may need to upgrade to take advantage of that fix.
Maintenance Support Phase:
During the Maintenance Support phase, which starts with the second year after release, the defined Critical and Important Security Fix Advisories may be released as they become available. No other fixes to the software are available.
Upgrades and updates are still to be delivered within this period.
Upgrade Policy for Major Releases:
vPlus will provide a supported upgrade path between major releases for vPlus. Upgrades will be supported between the latest minor release of previous version to the most current version of the next higher major release. In these cases, the upgrade process will be limited to support upgrading from the latest minor release of the previous version to the new major version.
For example:
Upgrading from vProtect 4.0 to vPlus 5.0 is supported, assuming vProtect 4.3 being the most current release of the 4.x series and intermediary update to 4.3 is required in such case.
Upgrade from Beta / Pre-release releases to a fully supported release is not supported.
Upgrade Policy for Minor Releases:
Customers are expected to update new minor releases as and when they become available. Accelerated fixes will not be provided for issues that have been previously fixed in a subsequent release; customers are expected and encouraged to keep their systems current and upgraded to the latest version of product to keep up to date on all patches and fixes.
In circumstances where the reported issue is not fixed in the current shipping release, the customer is still expected to upgrade their systems to the latest release (n) or in some exceptional cases, the immediate previous release (n-1). This is to ensure that any fixes are developed and verified against the latest or the immediate previous release.
Security Updates:
Throughout the support lifecycle, qualified security issues of Critical or Important impact, as well as select mission-critical bugs, will be addressed by updated packages.
Delivery of vPlus Advisories:
For the high-priority bugs and vulnerabilities vPlus announces Fix Advisories with the recommendation to update to the specified version. Fixes are always included with the next version of packages (as the regular RPM updates).
Fix Advisories may contain security or bug fixes. All Fix Advisories are tested and qualified against the respective, active vPlus major release.
All released Fix Advisories remain accessible to active subscribers for the entire vPlus life cycle.
vPlus actively develops only the last major version’s minor release (for example a bug found in vProtect 4.3 or vProtect 4.2 after the release of vPlus 5.0 could only be fixed in the newest build of vProtect 4.3 release).
Fix Advisories or hotfixes for earlier releases are provided at the discretion of vPlus to address critical impact security issues with a significant customer business impact.
During the life cycle of a major release vPlus makes commercially reasonable efforts to maintain binary compatibility for the core runtime environment across all minor releases and Fix Advisories. If necessary, vPlus may make exceptions to this compatibility goal for critical impact security issues or other significant issues.
vPlus compatibility
Each minor version of product delivers a new Compatibility Level based on the minor version number. Each release supports at least the current and previous minor release Compatibility Level.
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