Our most recent IRIS release introduced an issue for a small number of partners using agentless backup on older versions of vSphere (specifically, vSphere 5.0 and 5.1, both of which were general support end-of-lifed by VMware last year).
The current issue was caused by an update in the VMware SDK leveraged by IRIS; this SDK update was required for us to add enhanced agentless support for vSphere 6.5. Unfortunately, this most recent version of the SDK also had deprecated support for both 5.0 and 5.1, consistent with VMware policy. This ultimately caused agentless backups to fail in older vSphere versions.
Although we intend long-term to match our vSphere version support with VMware's own lifecycle, we realize this change was not communicated proactively to our partners. For that I apologize.
Therefore, we have enacted a remediation plan for those affected partners and will also be extending our vSphere 5.0 and 5.1 support by another 6 months to enable partners time to update vSphere or migrate to agent-based backups. The update repairing vSphere 5.0 and 5.1 support will be available shortly.
Robert Gibbons
Chief Technology Officer