What next with Windows server 2012 (R2) and SQL Server 2012 End of Support?
SQL server 2012 came to end of support in July 12, 2022, and Windows server 2012 and 2012 R2 came to end of support in Oct 10, 2023. The question, what next for organizations which still use these systems on their production environments be it on-premises or in another cloud platform (AWS, GCP)?
Organizations who find themselves in this situation are being advised to upgrade to the supported versions, but why? This is because of these three reasons:
- Security: We understand that one of the ways of avoiding security scare within an environment, is to move away from that environment to a safer environment. We comprehend that outdated software can pose security risks. The recommended solution is to upgrade to the latest versions which will keep your systems safe.
- Compliance: It is true that the latest versions often help meet industry standards, ensuring compliance as well as better integrations with other systems or applications.
- Support: As a customer you will have support in case you face challenges that need problem-solving.
So as a customer or technical support, you will be asking yourself what options you do have to ensure your systems are compliant, get the support required in case you face issues and ensure your systems are secure. There are three ways that organizations can get to approach this situation, your choice will solely depend on your current requirement.
Create a fresh install windows server with the required supported OS version, for example Windows server 2016, 2019, or 2022. Migrate the roles and applications to the created server. For applications, you can choose to manually install them on the target server. The roles here cannot be migrated using Azure Migrate.
Migrating Windows server Roles and features. This is addressed fully on this particular Microsoft documentation, since there are plethora of Roles and Features that require different tools to migrate.
Migrating roles and features in Windows Server | Microsoft Learn
Use Azure Migrate to discover, assess and migrate the servers either as is – Infrastructure as a Service or follow through with the Azure modernization aspect – Platform as a service (this is majorly for the SQL server – Customer can either choose to go with Azure SQL database or Azure database Managed Instance).
Virtual machines that are hosted in Azure automatically enabled for ESU and the interesting bit is that these updates are provided free of charge.
Use the purchase model for the Extended Security Updates if the customer wants to have complete air gap solution through purchasing the ESU traditional annual license. You can also choose to use Azure Arc where you get to pay for the ESU license on a monthly basis, and if you upgrade to Windows server 2016, 2019 0r 2022, you stop paying for the ESU license. Both scenarios requiring the customer to have Software Assurance.
Modality for purchasing the Extended Security Update (ESU) license
First and foremost, the ESU license supports both Physical cores and Virtual cores. The minimum number of cores required for each is as discussed below.
For the Physical cores, the ESU license is applied to the server host in which virtualization has been done and accommodating certain number of virtual machines. For the Windows server Datacenter version, it supports unlimited number of virtual machines but for the Windows server Standard version supports two virtual machines. So, the minimum ESU license supported for the physical cores needs to be 16 cores, no matter the number of virtual machines on the host. This is because the ESU license is applied to the Host not to individual virtual machines inside that host.
For the Virtual cores, the minimum cores required for the ESU license is 8 cores, going with the Windows server standard version because of the cheaper cost as compared to the Datacenter version.
So, this is applied to the individual virtual machines. Even if the virtual machine has for example 2vCPUs, still the ESU license for the virtual cores will be 8 cores.
