In the course of this year, almost 10 million antiquated Windows Server 2003 servers will have their applications and data removed and deployed on new servers, and the old servers will be shut down and disposed of. It is a natural assumption that the destination servers will be Server 2012, but that’s not necessarily the case, nor should it be.

You have three choices from Microsoft: Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2008 R2 and the Azure cloud service. Here are the pros and cons of each.

Windows Server 2012 R2

Windows Server 2012 comes with an integrated and significantly updated version of Hyper-V over the Server 2008 version, an IP address management function that supports both IPv4 and IPv6, a new file system called ReFS, and a big update to PowerShell, making it almost an operating system within an operating system. 

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