An example of legacy software that cannot move was a customer that had a legacy version of SAP 4.7 requiringMicrosoft SQL Server 2000 with patches, which cannot be installed on Windows Server 2016. Additionally, SAP 4.7 uses a Windows MMC (Microsoft management console) plugin to control the server and this plugin is also not supported with the latest version of MMC available on Windows Server 2016. In order to retire Windows Server 2003, the customer would have no choice but to upgrade the SAP software to the latest version at a very high licensing cost; unless another solution could be found.
Solution
Cloudpaging contains advanced features that can templatize and abstract information from the Windows environment and provision an application using a file system driver that normalize the file content between Windows operating systems. This technology allowed Microsoft SQL Server 2000 to be packaged on Windows Server 2003 and delivered to Windows Server 2016. The legacy SAP 4.7 application was also packaged with MMC plugin on Windows Server 2003 and was set to run in the isolated virtual layer with SAP configured to run in the integrated virtual layer. By running isolated the MMC plugin, this layered disposition Cloudpaging container was able to load SAP’s MMC plugin without conflicts on Server 2016. This allowed the legacy SAP software to run on Windows Server 2016 without issues.
Using Cloudpaging, customers can isolate conflicts between the legacy components and newer versions, and can successfully package legacy applications and deploy them to either Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016 without issues.