Should you hold off migrating from Windows Server 2003 until Server vNext is released?

A couple of weeks back Microsoft released the preview version of Server vNext. If you’re a bit of a chronic procrastinator, and you’re still not fully committed to your plans to migrate from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2012 R2, this news may have seemed like a bit of a blessing.

Why perform all that effort of migrating everything off Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2012 R2 when, if you just wait six months or so, Windows Server vNext will be out?

While it’s a creative excuse, the reality is as follows:

Unless you only have a small number of servers, the likelihood is that if you’ve been procrastinating about migrating away from Windows Server 2003, you’re going to have trouble ensuring that you’ve migrated all your workloads to an operating system that is fully supported today, rather than an operating system that may or may not be released sometime in the next six months.

The other thing to consider is that the tools for migrating workloads from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2012 R2 have been around a while. Because people have been using them and providing feedback, those tools have reached a certain level of maturity. Tools for migrating from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server vNext simply don’t exist at the moment.

You should already be migrating workloads away from Windows Server 2003. That doesn’t mean waiting for the next best thing to come down the pipe from Microsoft, but to instead migrate to a fully supported operating system that has been out for some time and for which migration tools and advice already exists. Holding out for the next version of the OS isn’t a sound strategy, at this point it’s just an excuse to procrastinate.