Microsoft Extended Security Updates, PAYG, and Azure Arc

Windows Server 2012/R2 goes out of support on October 10th, 2023 – that’s less than 3 months from the time of writing. Additionally, SQL Server 2012 went out of support on July 12th, 2023 – that’s 11 days ago at the time of writing!

Microsoft’s preference is, as always, that you upgrade to a newer version of the software…ideally in Azure. However, for Enterprise Agreement organisations that don’t want to/can’t AND have money to spare (as well as existing Software Assurance), there is another option – Extended Security Updates (ESU). Introduced with the 2008 wave of support ending, they are again available for 2012…but now, announced at Inspire 2023, there is a new twist.

ESU via Azure Arc

Azure Arc is Microsoft’s ever-growing platform for connecting resources across Azure, on-premises, and 3rd-party cloud environments too. Connecting your 2012/R2 servers to Azure Arc enables you to acquire ESUs via a Pay As You Go (PAYG model – one of Microsoft’s new favourite things.

This means you can pay on a monthly, rather than annual, basis. While this will help customer budgets, I suspect it is also Microsoft’s hope that it will make organisations more likely to continually work to upgrade and migrate old servers. Previously, if you’ve paid for a year you might as well take a year to do that process but now – the sooner you upgrade/migrate, the faster you can remove that ongoing cost.

You can use your Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) funds to cover ESUs on PAYG via Azure Arc and manage costs using Azure Cost Management. There are also technical benefits such as not needing to acquire additional license keys.

Availability

Currently the PAYG ESUs are available via:

• EA
• EAS
• SCE
• EES

agreements…no CSP you’ll notice.

Finally, it is to be noted that, according to Microsoft here, the ESU pricing is now the same each year:

For more information, check out the Microsoft posts below:

https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/windowsserver/2023/07/18/new-options-for-windows-server-2012-r2-end-of-support-from-azure/?WT.mc_id=modinfra-0000-socuff

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-arc-blog/new-options-for-extended-security-updates-enabled-by-azure-arc/ba-p/3876737?WT.mc_id=modinfra-0000-socuff

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-arc/servers/prepare-extended-security-updates