Service extension for old releases of IBM i

I am grateful to the person who sent me the link to the IBM Support document "Service Extension for IBM i 7.3, 7.2, and 7.1", dated July 10, 2023.

I am not going to repeat what the document says, I will provide a link to it below.

The last dates that you can have support for these old releases is:

• IBM i 7.1:  If you are running this operating system on an IBM Power 7, Power 7+, or Power 8 server then you are already off extended support.
  If you are running on an IBM Power 9 extended support will end April 30, 2024.
  IMHO if you have a Power 9 there would have to be a very, very good reason why you should not have upgraded it to 7.4 or 7.5 by now.
   
• IBM i 7.2:  Extended support ends April 30, 2024.
   
• IBM i 7.3:  Extended support ends September 30, 2026.
   

The cost of the service extension for these old IBM i releases is making them a lot more expensive than the currently supported releases, 7.4 and 7.5.

You can find this document here.

If you are running an old release this document shows that IBM wants to encourage you to migrate to a later release. If your IBM Power server cannot run 7.4 or 7.5 then it is time to look to upgrade your hardware too. Why would you want to put your business at risk with unsupported releases of software and hardware? Think of all the security vulnerabilities the older releases do not have fixed.

Another interesting thing I found in the document is a link to another IBM support page that lists all of the IBM Power servers and the versions of IBM i they can run. You can find that here.