Thank you for taking the time to take this survey; your feedback is critical to our decision making and planning.

Before you take this survey, however, it might be helpful to ensure that we're clear on some of the terminology used. Primarily, this survey deals with the acquisition, evaluation and deployment of incremental vSphere releases into an existing customer environment. Within that space, we look at a few scenarios - updates and upgrades, specifically.

Updates, generally, address issues within an existing release; they're not intended to be vehicles for new features and shouldn't change the customer experience, when compared to the version to which the update applies. We've been issuing Update releases for some time now and they're usually labeled with "Update," as in "vSphere 5.0, Update 2."

Upgrades, which includes both Minor releases (vSphere 5.1, vSphere 4.5, etc) and Major releases (vSphere 4.0, vSphere 5.0, etc), bring new features, new functions and, in most cases, changes in customer experience and, in the case of Major releases, licensing.

This survey is trying to understand the lifecycle of these releases, the potential overlaps and potential paths that our customers will traverse in moving between versions.