Updated - 01/2020
This notice is to help educate customers around end of support and end of life dates for Microsoft operating systems you may host at 3z.
This notice is to help explain why 3z must also discontinue any sort of SLA based support around these products and to help customers determine upgrade paths to move onto supportable platforms.
When a manufacturer ends support for software or hardware that leaves 3z with no support route when you have an issue with a system. Any systems in the following table are now considered out of support and 3z will make a best-effort to support them, but we cannot include these any longer in our SLA based support contracts and customers must accept the risk if they continue to run these systems.
What:
Vendor | Item | End of Support Date |
Microsoft | Windows Server 2000 | 7/13/2010 |
Microsoft | Windows Server 2003 | 4/14/2009 |
Microsoft | Windows Server 2008 | 01/14/2020 |
Microsoft | Windows Server 2008 R2 | 01/14/2020 |
Microsoft | Windows XP | 7/13/2010 |
Microsoft | Windows 7 | 01/14/2020 |
This list only includes the most common of items – for a complete list of items and their Microsoft product lifecycle dates, please visit https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/search/ or contact helpdesk@3z.net if you have specific questions
You may also have other 3rd party applications that are end of support – we highly recommend you contact your VAR for any accounting, crm and other mission critical applications you run to verify they are within their support lifecycle.
Why:
Products that are outside of their vendor life-cycle must be exempt from our support SLAs as our own software vendors, hardware vendors and support systems will also no longer support these systems.
For example, when Microsoft discontinues support for Windows 2003 most vendors who write monitoring, backup and management applications will also begin to drop support for 2003. This leaves us unable to backup and maintain systems.
Services potentially affected by EOL/EOS software –
- Patch Management – once an OS is out of support and MS ceases to issue patches our patch management platforms will often drop
- File Level and Application Level backups – while 3z will always have the ability to restore a VM via snapshot – some of our agent or application level backups may cease to function when backup vendors drop support for operating systems.
What do I need to do?
Contact helpdesk@3z.net for a list of your servers that may be running out of date or unsupported operating systems.
These systems need to be reviewed and upgraded and/or replaced in order to return them to SLA status.
Please contact 3z for assistance with quoting and scoping what upgrades are needed and appropriate.
If you do not act on these upgrades 3z will continue to make a best-effort in supporting these systems, but you are risking significant downtime and data loss if we’re unable to maintain and support these systems.