SQL Server 2005 End of Life: The Migration Opportunity for Hosting Partners

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Greetings Microsoft hosting partners! My name is Jason Perlow, and I’m a Technology Strategist with the Microsoft Partner Hosting and Cloud Services (PH&CS) team.

While some of you may have already met me over the phone or in-person at an event, you might also know me from my writings on ZDNet.

I’m now privileged to be blogging and engaging via social media for our group as well, where I will be leading our partner community outreach efforts.

My first subject? Our flagship data platform, Microsoft SQL Server.

Chances are, many of your customers are still running workloads on SQL Server 2005, in combination with Windows Server 2003. However, Windows Server 2003 reached End of Life on July 15th 2015, and SQL Server 2005 is quickly approaching its End of Life on April 12, 2016.

This presents a great opportunity to our service provider partners to serve as trusted advisors and help our mutual customers make the transition. If you haven’t started, you’ve got about five months to prepare and help your customers transition their application workloads to a fully supported and modernized Windows Server and SQL Server platform.

I recently spoke with my teammate Sarah Barela, also known affectionately as “SQL Sarah,” about what Microsoft hosting partners can do to help our mutual customers with this transition and address any End of Life issues or concerns about SQL Server 2005.

Below are the top takeaways from our conversation, as well as tools and resources available to help with the transition. You can also listen to our full conversation at the end of this post.

  • Microsoft SQL Server 2014 and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 is the preferred platform combination for migrating legacy SQL Server 2005 and Windows Server 2003 workloads.
  • The SQL Server Upgrade Advisor can help you and your customers determine what, if any changes in the SQL Server databases need to be made in order to run on SQL Server 2014. Many databases may not require any changes at all, or only require minor changes.
  • SQL Server 2014 has as SQL Server 2005 compatibility mode that can be used to host older applications that cannot be easily modernized.
  • Most applications will still work after certifying the database running on the new SQL Server 2014 platform, but ample time should be allotted for testing.
  • In the coming months, we will publish marketing materials, resources and whitepapers on the Microsoft Cloud and Hosting Services website to assist you as you migrate your customer workloads to SQL Server 2014. 

Have more SQL Server questions? Contact me at jasonpe@microsoft.com or Sarah Barela at sarahb@microsoft.com.

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