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Upgrading your aging servers and operating systems can reduce costs and provide significant benefits that can easily outweigh any cost of upgrading.
If you're running Windows Server 2003, you're running 10 year old technology. Substantial improvements have been made in those 10 years that help businesses compete better in today's marketplace.
Outdated servers can be inefficient to run and more expensive to maintain. Upgrading to Windows Server 2012 allows you to modernize and standardize your IT infrastructure and consolidate servers. Results can include:
- Reduced operational costs and increased efficiencies
- Improved employee productivity
- Ability to be cloud-ready
- Increased business agility and ability to scale to accommodate business growth
- Improved system availability
- Ability to implement cost-effective backup and disaster recovery solutions
- Mainstream Support from Microsoft for Windows Server 2003 ended in July 2010.
- Yes. Microsoft provides several resources to help with application migration and planning. For additional information on application migration, the following resources are available:
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Windows Server 2012 Compatibility cookbook
Provides info about new features Windows Server 2012 operating system and guidelines regarding compatibility with existing programs.
Microsoft Platform Ready Test Tool
Helps test applications for compatibility with latest technologies and platforms from Microsoft.
Windows Server App Certification Kit
Helps verify compatibility and security issues, evaluate third party applications and test line of business applications.
Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit
An automated inventory and assessment tool to help with migration projects and virtualization deployments.
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The majority of applications that run on Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 should work on Windows Server 2012 with no changes. (See table in Q3 above for resources to check compatibility.)
Alternatively, you are licensed to continue to run virtual instances of Windows Server 2003 on Windows Server 2012, if desired.
- Virtualization is a method of running multiple independent virtual operating systems on a single physical computer. It is a way of maximizing physical resources to maximize the investment in hardware.
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With virtualization, you can increase business capacity at a lower cost, reduce energy costs, and have an IT platform that can easily scale as business needs evolve.
The top five benefits of virtualizing are:
- Reduce hardware maintenance costs because of a lower number of physical servers
- Increase the space utilization efficiency in your data center
- Helps prevent one application from impacting another application when upgrades or changes are made
- Speed up server deployment
- Deploy multiple operating system technologies on a single hardware platform
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Microsoft virtualization gives you a cost-effective, easy-to-manage solution to help drive down the cost of doing business—offering an immediate return on a relatively small investment and extending your current hardware investments. Features that were previously only available and affordable to large enterprise are now accessible, affordable and easy to deploy for small and growing businesses.
Live migration and clustering are included at no cost. With Windows Server 2012, virtualization is built into the product through a server role called Hyper-V. This means you can easily integrate it with your existing infrastructure and management tools. Since Hyper-V is the “Windows you know,” you can use the in-house expertise you already have. In fact, if you know Windows, you know virtualization.
Hyper-V is built in so you don't have to spend valuable resources and time on learning a new skill set. There's no need to dedicate specialized IT staff to manage Hyper-V.
(Microsoft Hyper-V is a native hypervisor, or virtual machine manager, that enables platform virtualization on x86-64 systems.)
- Windows Server 2012 has been tested extensively. In fact there were over 500,000 pre-release downloads and 200 customers participated in Microsoft's early deployment program. In addition, Microsoft is so confident with Windows Server 2012 that Microsoft itself is running mission critical platforms like Bing on it.
