Extended Security Updates

Customers with older versions of Windows or SQL may be interested in Arc-enabled Servers to simplify their ESU licensing. To purchase ESU licensing, you have two primary options:

Purchase annual licenses through traditional Volume Licensing. This is the legacy approach.
Subscribe to ESUs through Azure Arc. With this option, instead of needing to purchase a whole year of ESUs for each of your systems, you only pay for the part of the year that you use.

The ESU subscription approach through Arc is a simple pay-as-you-go cost once enabled. This is especially advantageous to customers who are planning to migrate off of their older version of Windows or SQL mid-year–saving them the cost of ESUs for the remainder of the year.

Enabling ESU subscriptions with Arc

The steps required for enabling ESU subscriptions with Arc are different, depending on whether you are licensing for Windows or SQL, but both start with the deployment of the Arc agent as discussed in the Overview article.

For ESUs-only Arc deployment, there is a shorter list of endpoints required through your firewall.