SQL Server 2012 goes end of support on July 12, 2022 – that’s about 10 weeks from the time of writing! This means even security updates from Microsoft will no longer be provided to customers running this software – a situation organisations really don’t want to find themselves in.
It only seems like 5 minutes since this was the situation with SQL Server 2008 (it was actually almost 4 years ago!) which causes headaches for a lot of organisations. I’d say that, based on conversations at conferences and training sessions etc., SQL Server 2012 is going to be at least equally painful as many businesses seem to have got to 2012 and then no further, considering it to be much more modern than 2008.
If your business is still running SQL Server 2012 – what are your options?
Remain on-premises
Assuming you want to remain up to date on security patches (which I’d say you do!), you’ll need to acquire Extended Security Updates (ESU) from Microsoft which will give you 3 more years of security updates. That however, comes at a price:
- Year 1 = 75% of SQL Server license price
- Year 2 = 100% of SQL Server license price
- Year 3 = 125% of SQL Server license price
Let’s say you have a 4-core SQL Server 2012 Std box – approx. license cost of £5,000. That will mean:
- Year 1 = £3,750
- Year 2 = £5,000
- Year 3 = £6,250
3 year total = £15,000
Migrate to Azure
ESUs are included free of charge for workloads running in Microsoft Azure VMs – including “regular” Azure VMs as well as:
- Azure Dedicated Host
- VMware on Azure
- Nutanix Clusters on Azure
- Azure Stack HCI/Hub/Edge
You can save a big amount of money through not having to pay for the ESUs…but cloud migrations come with their own set of costs…as well as benefits.
If you’ve not already made a decision on this, please gather the relevant people together and discuss the option. While both the above options can seem expensive, I’d suggest they’re nothing when compared to the cost of a security breach/ransomware attack.
You can see more info in the Microsoft blog post here.
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 
Great run down, thanks Rich 👍