Coming Soon: Transition to WS2012/R2 ESUs enabled by Azure Arc for Year 2 and beyond

Announced during last week’s Windows Server Summit 2024, customers will be able to transition to Azure Arc for WS2012 Extended Security Updates enabled by Azure Arc for Year 2 if they had purchased Year 1 of Extended Security Updates for Volume Licensing. This experience will ask customers to supply their Invoice Id, corresponding to WS2012 ESU purchases from Volume Licensing.

With its pay as you go flexibility as an Azure billed service and inclusion of Azure management services like Azure Update Manager and Machine Configuration at no additional cost, WS2012 ESUs enabled by Azure Arc offer financial and experience benefits to customers. This is especially critical to support customers in their journey of migrating and modernizing End of Life infrastructure to Azure.

This transition experience is coming soon! To prepare, your organization can begin to review the connectivity requirements for Azure Arc, whitelisting the necessary endpoints, and deploying the Connected Machine agent to eligible Windows Server 2012/R2 Standard and Datacenter machines using at-scale options like Configuration Manager and Group Policy.

Beyond the announcement, we had three sessions covering Azure Arc capabilities during last week’s Windows Server Summit:

• Cloud operations for Windows Server through Azure Arc
• Keeping Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 protected after EOS
• Automate on-premises Windows Server from the cloud using Azure Arc

Empowering Windows Server customers to modernize to Azure management, Azure Arc is the bridge bringing cloud capabilities to Windows Servers across hybrid, multicloud, and edge environments. To sign up for feedback and notification when the experience becomes available, register at https://aka.ms/WS2012ArcESUTransition/.