With End of Support for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 Comes New Opportunities

Be sure your organization is ready for the end of support deadlines in January 2020 for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008

If you’re currently running Windows Server 2008 or Windows SQL Server 2008, you’re likely aware that Microsoft is ending support for these products in January of 2020. This means that you have some key decisions to make as far as how your company plans to upgrade your infrastructure to ensure you’re protected well in advance of the January 2020 deadline.

Options for Upgrading or Replacing Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008

If you own or work for an organization that’s currently using either Windows Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008, you have two primary options when it comes to upgrading your infrastructure, which we’ll outline below.

On-premises option

By simply upgrading your existing Windows Server and SQL Server instances to the latest versions, you’ll gain access to a variety of cloud features and be DevOps ready. The negative with this approach is that you may need to upgrade existing hardware as well, because your existing infrastructure may not be powerful enough to run Windows Server 2016 or SQL Server 2017.

Leverage the power of Azure

If you’re looking to get the most out of this opportunity to upgrade your infrastructure, you should look into Azure to either migrate your existing workloads to Azure Virtual Machines or rearchitecting your applications to work with Windows server containers and Azure data services. While this approach is likely more time consuming, it will allow you to be able to scale in the future as well as leverage the power of the cloud, as opposed to your internal aging hardware infrastructure.

Get free security updates by migrating to Azure VMs

You may not be aware, but you can actually move your existing applications to Azure VMs and receive free extended security updates for Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 VM’s for an additional three years after the original January 2020 deadline.

Also, you can also receive free extended security updates for SQL Server 2008 in Azure VM’s for an additional three years.

This approach allows you to migrate your existing infrastructure to Azure but still gain access to extended support should issues arise before you’re able to upgrade to newer versions of Windows Server and SQL Server.

In addition, Azure is the only cloud-based platform that’s allowing free extended security updates for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 at no additional cost. If you were to utilize other cloud-based platforms such as AWS, these features would incur extra charges.

Worried about your existing on-premises architecture – purchase extended server updates

While January 2020 is definitely a hard deadline, Microsoft is offering extended security updates for an additional 3 years for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008. While we would suggest that you go ahead and start thinking about upgrading your server architecture, it’s important that you understand that there is the availability to purchase extended security updates, but these updates obviously will be costly and putting those resources towards a more up to date infrastructure may make more sense depending on your situation.

Still unclear on the best path forward for your company’s infrastructure?

At MessageOps, it has always been our goal to provide you with the most up to date information related to the variety of Microsoft solutions, whether they’re on-premises or cloud-based. We understand that any time a major operating system and database upgrade is on the horizon, you’re bound to be a bit intimidated. Please know that we’ll be more than happy to work with you to bring your current server architecture into the 21st century.

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