With roughly 200 days before some 20 million-plus instances of Windows Server 2003 face an end of life support deadline on July 14, solution providers and their customers are going to have to make some hard decisions in the next 30 days or so.

The core instance of a Windows Server 2003 environment can be migrated to another Windows Server platform in as little as two weeks using Windows migration tools from vendors such as AppZero that automate a lot of the process. But when you factor in all the applications, Active Directory issues and network connections, each migration takes as much as 200 days to migrate the environment at an average cost of $2,000 to $3,000 per machine, said AppZero CEO Greg O’Connor. It’s not hard to see how a Windows Server 2003 migration project within larger organizations quickly can become a multimillion-dollar project when you factor in all the new infrastructure.

The more challenging issue, however, is the limited number of people available with the skills needed to manage a migration. The reality is that because of a lack of both time and money, solution providers and their customers will have to prioritize what application workloads running on Windows Server 2003 servers will be migrated before the deadline.

As for the rest of the workloads running on those three servers, there will be three basic choices:

The choice most likely used most often will be hosting the Windows Server 2003 server as a guest operating system running on top of a virtual machine. There is no shortage of virtual machine options, and a Windows 2003 guest operating system doesn’t even necessarily have to be deployed on top of a Windows Server platform; it can run reasonably well using virtual machine software deployed on a Linux server.

Of course, many organizations will also opt to deploy Windows Server 2003 as a guest operating system on top of virtual machine software running in the cloud. Regardless of the virtualization approach, running Windows Server 2003 as a guest operating system buys time, but it doesn’t mitigate all the security issues associated created by not being able to apply updates after July 14.

That issue can be addressed by purchasing a customer support agreement (CSA). Microsoft—for a price—will continue to provide Windows Server 2003 upgrades after July 14. But not only is this service a fairly expensive option that only the largest enterprise IT organizations can afford, it also gets more costly every year it is invoked. And even then, it’s only going to be available for a limited number of years.

The final option may prove most attractive of all for many solution providers. Rather than migrate the application workloads running on Windows Server 2003, it may be a whole lot simpler simply to retire them. Most of those applications probably could be replaced by another packaged application running on Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2012 or any number of Linux platforms running on premise or in the cloud. Or the customer may decide a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application is more than sufficient to meet their needs.

When you think about all that’s involved in making a migration with all the possible alternatives, it’s clear that only a subset of the application workloads running on Windows Server 2003 will be migrated. A huge percentage of those workloads will either be retired this year or continue to run as a guest operating system until no longer needed. Much like old soldiers, many of the application workloads running on Windows Server 2003 will never really die, they’ll simply just fade away.