You’re going to need a plan to get yourself off Server 2003

No matter how much you might wish them to simply disappear, the only way that you’re going to get your Server 2003 servers out of your environment is by coming up and enacting a plan.

It’s not enough to want to get rid of those servers running Server 2003, you have to have an idea on how you’re actually going to do that. The fact that they’ve remained in your datacenter so long means that getting rid of them isn’t something that can be accomplished simply. At this point, getting rid of Server 2003 from your environment is like the “boss fight” at the end of a video game level. While you can go into a “boss fight” banana cream pies blazing and hope to win, you’re more likely to be successful if you’ve got a strategy.

There’s another reason you need a plan. If you want to organize a custom support agreement with Microsoft, you’ll need to have a plan to migrate away from Server 2003. If you don’t have the plan, Microsoft won’t give you the custom support agreement.

What does a plan require?

If you don’t know what you need to migrate, have an idea how to migrate it, and have a vague deadline in mind, you don’t really have a plan.