After VMware announced that general support for ESX 3 was about to expire I received several emails with the same question. What’s the difference between general support and extended support? I think the following picture clearly depicts what the difference is between general support and extended support:

As you can see the only difference is that “non-critical bugs” will not be fixed and there will be no support for new hardware. Extended support ends on 2013/05/21 for ESX 3.5.

You can find all info regarding the VMware support policies here. Keep in mind that with vSphere the policy changed! There is no such a thing as “extended support”. General support is 5 years with vSphere and after that it is Technical Guidance only.