Last week, Microsoft announced new subscription plans for the organisations using Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 products to extend their plan for updated security patches without charge.

It is noteworthy that companies that are using SQL Server 2008/R2 and Windows Server 2008/R2 were nearing the end of their 10-year product life cycle support scheme which ends on July 9 2019, and January 14 2020. Ending the product life cycle support plan means that there will be no more security and feature updates for these products, unless the customers pay 75 per cent of the license cost of those products by buying annual custom plans. Not only would these custom solutions be hard to integrate, they would also be recurrent overheads for the businesses.

To make everything run smoothly, last year, the company announced a premium assurance plan for these two products. The plan involved six years of extended support although people were saying the plan was expensive and not feasible.

Realising this, Microsoft has replaced the plan with a new one that will allow the organisations to extend their support plans for three years for free. Last Thursday, the company also released an FAQ document in which it stated that “We will no longer sell Premium Assurance, but we will honor the terms of Premium Assurance for customers who already purchased it.”

To get the benefit of the free support plans, companies will have to migrate to the Azure Stack and for companies migrating to Azure Virtual Machine, there will be extended support for both the products for three years with no additional charges, over the standard Azure VM pricing. Furthermore, the company has also promised additional discounts under its Azure Hybrid Benefit program.

Another way to benefit from this plan includes migrating the workloads of both the products to Azure SQL Database Managed Instance. The service, whose preview was launched a few months ago, is expected to release in the fourth quarter of this calendar year.

Resources:

https://redmondmag.com/articles/2018/07/12/extended-security-updates-for-2008-windows-servers.aspx

https://aka.ms/eos-offer-faq

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-offers-windows-server-2008-sql-server-2008-users-a-new-way-to-extend-support-for-free/