News

Dead or Expiring Microsoft Server Products for 2024

• By Kurt Mackie
• 01/08/2024

IT pros may need to roll up their sleeves and exercise their upgrade skills soon, as some Microsoft server products will be reaching their "end of support" (EoS) phases this year.

Unsupported products don't get security patches or other product updates from Microsoft, so they could become security and compliance risks for organizations. Products are deemed to be "unsupported" when they are still being run after the end of Microsoft's "Extended Support" phase, which is the name for the last five years (sometimes less) of an overall 10-year support period under Microsoft's Fixed Lifecycle policy.

This article points to the servers exiting support in 2024, although lots of other software, notably Microsoft Delve and Visual Studio 2013, also are reaching the end, as well as plenty of Azure services. Microsoft provides a more comprehensive list of the products losing support in 2024 in this document.

Server Products Reaching the End
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 will reach its EoS phase on Jan. 9, 2024. Organizations can at best upgrade to Dynamics CRM 2015, per this murky Microsoft document.

Microsoft Host Integration Server 2013, used to integrate IBM-hosted data with "on-premises and Azure Cloud applications" also reaches its EoS phase on Jan. 9, 2024. Possibly, organizations will be able to use the Host Integration Migration tool to migrate to a newer product on the same or different server, as suggested by this Microsoft document.

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2013 will reach EoS on April 9, 2024. It's a platform used for "source-code-control, project-management, and team-collaboration," per Microsoft's description. It's possible to upgrade from the 2013 product, but it may also require upgrading SharePoint and SQL Server, this Microsoft document explained.

SQL Server 2014 will reach EoS on July 9, 2024. Microsoft indicated that it is possible to upgrade from SQL Server 2014 to SQL Server 2022 in this document.

Users of the Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse (Analytics Platform System) got a bit of a break from Microsoft. It was scheduled for EoS on Oct. 8, 2024, but that EoS date has been pushed out to March 31, 2026, per this Microsoft article.

The Living Dead: Server ESU Support
The list of server products reaching the end of support includes a few stragglers because of Microsoft's Extended Security Update (ESU) program. Under this program, organizations paying annually for ESUs continue to get "Critical" security patch support even after traditional product support has ended. However, as with all Microsoft software, support will eventually end -- in most cases, after ESU Year 3 (Azure workloads get an extra year, but support also will end).

Here are the ESU-supported Windows Server and SQL Server products reaching EoS in 2024:

• Windows Server 2008, ESU Year 4 for Azure only (Jan. 9, 2024)
• Windows Server 2008 R2, ESU Year 4 for Azure only (Jan. 9, 2024)
• Microsoft SQL Server 2012, ESU Year 2 (July 9, 2024)
• Windows Server 2012, ESU Year 1 (Oct. 8, 2024)
• Windows Server 2012 R2, ESU Year 1 (Oct. 8, 2024)

The ESU program just offers support for three years maximum past the EoS date for the on-premises server products, but there can be a Year 4 support exception if those server workloads are run from an Azure virtual machine. Organizations using Azure Arc with Azure virtual machines just pay for the Azure operations costs in such cases.