WebSphere App Server 7 support ends in April 2018

If you are currently running IBM WebSphere Application Server (WAS) on version 7, you have until April of 2018 to upgrade. After that, IBM will no longer offer you support (other than to tell you to upgrade).  However there hundreds of custom ISV solutions that have not yet been certified for new versions of the product. In some cases, the ISV product has been customized for your specific environment, which means that all that custom code must be evaluated and carefully updated as well before you can fully upgrade.

Mitigation Planning

Start evaluating your environment today and find out what applications you have in your inventory that are currently on WAS 7.0. From there, you should review which ones are third party (ISV) application to which you do not have source code for.

If you have the source code for the applications, the next step is to scan the code for incompatibilities. WAS 7.0 allowed applications that were compiled with the JDK 1.3. to continue to run. You will want to update those applications and recompile them with a more recent compiler. Below is the JDK compatibility matrix for the various versions of WebSphere:

If you do not have source for the third party applications, you should visit your vendor’s support website or call the vendor’s support personnel to see what the support plan is for the product, and plan to upgrade the ISV software accordingly

Contingency Planning

If you are no longer able to receive troubleshooting support from IBM, you CAN receive troubleshooting support from us, Strongback Consulting. We offer retainer services for customers who are stuck on a WAS release, and cannot move or migrate, or have waited to migrate until after support had ended.

If you have lost the code to your own software that your team wrote, well, we can help with that as well. Likely we will help you replace the software, or re-architect the solution using more modern frameworks that will be more robust than prior API’s.