Tick tock.

SQL Server 2017 extended support ends on October 12, 2027.

That means today, you need to start working through this list of labor-intensive tasks:

• Talk to your compliance, insurance, and legal people to see if your company is subject to any rules or regulations that mean you’re not allowed to run software if it isn’t under manufacturer support
• Talk to your accounting and licensing people to see if your 2017 & prior servers are licensed with Software Assurance, giving you the ability to upgrade at no charge, or if you’re going to need to add licensing to next year’s budget
• Talk to the developers & vendors whose databases are on those older servers and find out what’s the newest version of SQL Server that they support
• Talk to the stakeholders and budget folks to document their desired RPO/RTO goals (and make sure they understand the budget cost implications of the RPO/RTO they select)
• After agreeing on a target version and an RPO/RTO for HA, DR, and corruption, design an environment that will meet those goals
• Provision the VMs, hardware, storage to build that environment
• Build it out, including configuring it to match your old environment, making any changes that make sense on the new version (like questioning old trace flags)
• Restore your current databases over to it, load test it with maintenance jobs
• Plan out how you’re going to move the databases from the old to new environments, like log shipping or Distributed Availability Groups – this might be the first old versions you’re migrating where you can actually use DAGs as a one-time migration tool
• Test the migration so you can give users a rough estimate of the expected outage time
• Perform the migration, and go live in the new environment

Even if you can knock out one of these per month on every 2017 & prior instance that you have, you’re still gonna be banging up against the October 12, 2027 deadline.

It’s not like your servers will magically stop working on that date – but if your company’s insurance or compliance rules say you’re not allowed to run out-of-date software, then it might be your butt on the line for not getting onto a supported version. (And if you’re subject to that, and you’re still running on SQL Server 2016, I’d be curious to hear in the comments how your experience went trying to purchase 2016 Extended Security Updates (ESU) from Microsoft.)

I do really mean it when I say “talk to your company’s compliance, insurance, and legal people.” By innocently asking them, “Hey, are we allowed to run unsupported software here?” it turns them into the villain who demands that the company get into compliance. You can still be the innocent bystander – while happily enjoying the great feeling of getting the company onto current versions, and keeping your own skills current and your backlog thick.

Thankfully, after this, we have a bit of a reprieve before the massively popular SQL Server 2019 goes out of support in January 2030. That one’s going to be a sea-change event.

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