Just a friendly reminder to everyone that just like all good things come to and end so does the extended support for these two Microsoft products. First will be the Windows 2003 R2 with the end of lifecycle date set to July 14 2015 and soon after that SQL Server 2005 with it’s end of lifecycle date set to April 12 2016.
You can still run these products after these dates of course but it’s definitely not recommended and the reason is simple. End of the extended support means that neither of these products will be receiving any patches or security updates, ever. So if you’re not already working on upgrading them, now would be a good time to start.
Even though I’m glad to see these obsolete beasts go the way the dinosaurs did, I also feel compelled to say something nice about them. So here it goes.
Windows 2003 R2
You’ve always been the silent and reliable workhorse, a solid cornerstone in many current infrastructures. You have provided us with backward compatibility for numerous products that could not be run in modern day operating systems. You were never the prettiest or the fastest of the operating systems, but I always knew I could count on you to run my software.
I would love to say that you’ll be missed… But I won’t.
SQL Server 2005
When I first saw your DMV’s and the amount of information they provided I was amazed. Never before had SQL Server offered so much data and statistics for administrators to work with and it took so little effort to get it. You would eagerly tell us what indexes you’d love to have in your tables, how badly they were messed up by our reckless modifications or what were you WAITing on.
What I didn’t care about so much was that your Standard Edition would support ridiculous amounts of RAM and CPU cores as that led to some poor design choices that haunt us in this day.
The Better Tomorrow
While a bit of a nostalgia is fine, there are fortunately better and newer options available for running your business critical environments with. Here’s two for you:
I wish you success in your upgrading endeavours!
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