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Lifecycle

Prepare now for end of support in 2019 and 2020

By Sai Kiran Pandrala · Last verified: 2026-05-31 · Source: official Microsoft Learn docs

At a glance
Product familyLifecycle
Document sourceLifecycle
Guide typeReference Guide
Skill levelIntermediate to advanced
Time15 - 60 minutes depending on environment

This page documents Prepare now for end of support in 2019 and 2020 for engineers working with Lifecycle. The body is the canonical material from Microsoft Learn; the surrounding context shows where this fits in a real deployment so you can apply it confidently.

Reference content from Microsoft documentation

End-of-support work is the boring, unglamorous IT job that quietly saves companies from headline-grade breaches. I've spent the better part of seven years migrating workloads off Server 2008 R2, then 2012 R2, then SQL 2012 - and most of the lessons are the same. Prepare now for end of support in 2019 and 2020 is one of those notices you cannot ignore.

I've seen this fail when an enterprise treats EOL as a single migration sprint instead of a 6-9 month programme. Below is the practical playbook plus the canonical Microsoft framing, so you can plan a defensible exit before the support clock runs out.

The general end-of-support playbook

  1. Confirm the exact date and SKU coverage on the Microsoft Lifecycle Policy site (learn.microsoft.com/lifecycle). Always link the exact page in your change ticket.
  2. Inventory affected workloads via your existing tooling - Configuration Manager, Intune, Microsoft Defender for Endpoint software inventory, Azure Resource Graph.
  3. Group by criticality, complexity, and downtime tolerance. Migrate easy and low-risk first.
  4. For everything else: rehost to Azure for free ESU, or pay ESU on-prem with rising prices each year.
  5. Decommission immediately on cut-over. Lingering EOL servers are the most common source of "we forgot we still ran that" breaches.

Rollback and day-2 ops

  1. For every workload moved, keep a snapshot of the source system for at least 30 days. Cheap insurance.
  2. Document the migration runbook in your team wiki - including the exact CLI commands you ran, not paraphrased.
  3. Tag every migrated Azure resource with migration-wave and source-system tags. Future-you will need them when costs spike.

What I watch after rollout

FAQ

Where does this prepare now for end of support in 2019 and 2020 content come from?
It is sourced from the official Microsoft Learn documentation for Lifecycle. Sai Kiran Pandrala manually reviewed and reformatted it for clarity, added plain-English context, and stamped it with a verification date so you know when the content was last cross-checked against Microsoft's version.
How often is this reference updated?
Microsoft updates Lifecycle documentation continuously. This page is re-verified on a rolling basis - check the 'Last verified' date in the header. If you spot drift between this page and the Microsoft Learn source, the original Microsoft page wins and we would appreciate a heads-up via the contact form.
Can I use prepare now for end of support in 2019 and 2020 information for production planning?
Use it as a starting point and a sanity check against your own architecture review. For production decisions on Lifecycle, always pair it with: your tenant's specific SKU and region, your compliance constraints, and Microsoft's own service health and pricing pages at the time of decision.
Why is this reference free?
HowToFixMe is ad-supported. There are no paywalls, no email signups, no signup-to-read patterns. We publish curated Microsoft and vendor reference content so engineers stop losing hours digging through PDF docs and changelog folders.
Where can I read the original Microsoft source?
On the Microsoft Learn portal under Lifecycle. Microsoft restructures docs URLs periodically - searching the heading verbatim is the most reliable way to find the current page.

References

Related guides worth a look while you sort this one out: