Microsoft has recently published their vision and plans for the future of Windows Azure Pack. This document called as “Windows Azure Pack Roadmap and Future Support” and must be taken into consideration by any service providers who has datacenters based on WAP and related components (SC, Windows Server).
You can download the full version of roadmap here.
Here I’m just citing the most important quotations:
Product support for WAP and the current version of System Center will continue to be available until the end of 2022. Table 1 summarizes the product support lifecycle for the main components in a WAP cloud deployment.
Microsoft Azure Stack brings Azure to service provider datacenters so that they can accelerate time to market and expand the addressable market for their services portfolio. Application developers can maximize their productivity using a ‘write once, deploy to Azure or Azure Stack’ approach. Microsoft Azure Stack will be launching in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2016
Service Providers should continue to use Windows Server Hyper-V for highly virtualized environments (for example, virtualizing their most demanding workloads) along with Windows Azure Pack and System Center for management. More importantly, they should sell and support what is available today that end customers understand and ask for, and then prepare for future evolution of technologies.
Related Links
- Azure Stack : Hardware Requirements
- Windows Server 2016 Licensing and Pricing
- Step-by-step installation of Windows Azure Pack
- System Center 2016 TP4 (VHD)
- Support lifecycle for any Microsoft product
- Windows Azure Pack product lifecycle
- Windows Server product lifecycle
- System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager product lifecycle
UseIT | Roman Levchenko 