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Credit: Microsoft
Microsoft places three years of additional support in front of customers running Windows Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 when they move server workloads to Azure's cloud-based Redmond.
SQL Server 2008 – – and its tracking, SQL Server 2008 R2 – release support on July 9, 2019, or in less than a year.
Meanwhile, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 will be removed from the media approximately six months later, on January 14, 2020.
After these dates, the server software will not receive security updates, This makes it vulnerable to hacker attacks exploiting uncorrected security vulnerabilities.
To drive customers to the cloud, Microsoft will provide an additional three years of support for Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 when the workloads of these systems are migrated to Azure or Azure SQL Database Managed Instance virtual machines, respectively (The latter is a new service to start in
Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 workloads transferred to Azure will receive fixes for vulnerabilities rated "Critical" or "Important" until January 2023; SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 will receive patches for bugs designated as "Critical", with the end of additional support scheduled for July 2022.
Servers migrated to Azure must be covered by Software Assurance to qualify for all three [19659003] This new system, named "Extended Security Updates", replaces a Microsoft additional support program called "Premi um Assurance "for Windows Server and SQL Server.
Redmond introduced Premium Insurance in December 2016 and began selling it three months later.
Premium Assurance has offered up to six years of additional support for a series of Windows editions and SQL Server – not just the 2008 varieties – at prices up to 12 percent of licenses
Premium Assurance was itself a replacement for Custom Support, a highly individualistic program that extended support after the usual 10 years, but which was not generally discussed publicly in deta.
Now Premium Insurance is dead. "We will no longer sell Premium Insurance, but we will honor premium insurance terms for customers who have already purchased it," Microsoft said in an FAQ (download PDF).
Although extended security updates are free to Azure, customers must pay the usual fees for Azure VMs or the SQL Database managed instance.
Azure costs can be reduced by taking advantage of Microsoft's Azure Hybrid Advantage, which according to the company can reduce prices by 80% for the transfer of Windows Server workloads to the cloud and up to 55% for migrating SQL Server workloads.
A savings calculator on the Microsoft website allows customers to calculate how much they would save.
t – or can not – move their on-premises Azure Windows Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 workloads to extended security applications, but the price is high: 75% of the total license cost per year. [19659019] Read More Salesforce installs Datorama, a cloud-based AI platform
Under Premium Insurance, the customer would pay 12% of his license each year, which would make more than six times more
The same 75% is also the price that companies must pay for Extended Security Updates if they use a third-party hosting service to park their Windows Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 workloads.
Unsurprisingly invited companies to upgrade to the latest versions of Windows Server and SQL Server – 2016 for the first, 2017 for the latest – while touting the bets Extended security updates as a way to avoid doing so.
"wrote Takeshi Numoto, a senior executive at Cloud-Enterprise. "Today's servers and hyper-converged solutions can provide important security features, as well as significant performance and cost-effectiveness."
More information on the removal of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 is available on Microsoft
(Reported by Gregg Keizer, Computerworld)
