EOL Replacement Planning
Replace on your schedule, not the vendor's.
Last reviewed
A hardware refresh driven by end-of-life dates is one of the more predictable capital projects in networking. The dates are published years in advance. The replacement products are usually named in the EOL bulletin. The failure mode is not complexity — it's procrastination. Teams that start planning 6 months before the support date are buying emergency replacements at list price and deploying on weekends.
Start with the calendar
Know what's expiring and when. The EOL Soon view shows products within 12 months of their last date of support. The calendar gives a timeline view across all vendors. Export what's relevant to your environment and sort by date.
Pay attention to the end-of-security-support date, not just the last-date-of-support. The device stops getting security patches months or years before the final support cutoff. That's your real deadline.
Group by vendor, sequence by risk
Batching replacements by vendor gets you volume pricing and reduces the number of parallel procurement tracks. Within each vendor batch, sequence by exposure: internet-facing first, then compliance-scoped, then internal infrastructure.
If you're running Cisco and Juniper gear that's both going EOL in the same quarter, don't try to replace both simultaneously unless you have the team for it. Stagger by a month or two.
Budget lead times
Supply chain lead times for networking gear have been volatile. Current-generation switches and firewalls can ship in weeks or take months depending on the vendor and model. Start the procurement process 12–18 months before the support date. This gives you time to evaluate the replacement platform, negotiate pricing, and absorb delivery delays.
Check the vendor's EOL bulletin for the recommended replacement product. Most bulletins include a migration path. If the replacement is itself approaching end-of-sale, skip a generation — you don't want to deploy hardware that will be EOL-announced within a year of installation.
Common mistakes
- Replacing on last-date-of-support instead of end-of-security-support. You're running unpatched for the gap.
- One-for-one replacement without right-sizing. EOL refreshes are an opportunity to consolidate or upgrade port density. Don't replace 4 old switches with 4 new ones if 2 would cover the load.
- Ignoring the optics and transceivers. If you're replacing a Catalyst 3750X with a Catalyst 9300, your old SFPs may not be compatible. Budget for optics.
- No lab time. The replacement platform runs different software. IOS-XE is not IOS. Junos EVO is not Junos. Budget time to validate your configs on the new platform before cutover.