Microsoft has expanded its support lifetime by two more years

Sep 25, 2012 13:24 GMT  ·  By

Windows Server 2008 will remain a bit longer in Microsoft’s support roadmap, as the company has just added two more years to its support lifetime.

The Redmond-based company planned to have Windows Server 2008 entering the extended, paid support in January 2013, but it has made a change to this timeframe, pushing the date back to January 15th, 2015.

This means that the platform will benefit from two more years of free, mainstream support, and it will benefit from extended until 2020. All these changes are visible on the company's support website.

Usually, the software giant offers five years of mainstream support for its operating system flavors, along with five more years of extended support.

While all updates and patches are offered for free for the platform during the mainstream support period, only security updates continue to be pushed out without charge in the Extended Support period.

“The Microsoft policy provides a minimum of five years of Mainstream Support or two years of Mainstream Support after the successor product ships, whichever is longer,” Microsoft notes.

“Modifications to the expiration dates for Windows Server 2008 are a result of the launch of Windows Server 2012, giving customers the additional 2 years of support,” the company continues.

As ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley notes, this is a different move than the one Microsoft made with Windows XP, which has seen its support period being extended due to the high popularity of the platform.

The support for this desktop client will be discontinued on April 8, 2014, which means that no new security fixes or other updates for it will be released from that day forth.

Microsoft has been long reminding its customers of this state of fact, and is doing so now as well, encouraging them to come up with upgrade strategies.

“If Windows XP is still being run in your environment and you feel that migration will not be complete by April 8, 2014, or you haven't begun migration yet, Microsoft is eager to help,” the company noted in its support lifecycle quarterly newsletter.