Forum Discussion
Support for M365 Apps (O365) on Windows 2022
First off I would like to thank everyone for the feedback and apologize for the delay in responding to this thread. Your feedback has made a difference, and sparked many internal discussions... we have customers running M365 on WS2016 and WS2019 today, and we want to enable staying current and secure being able to upgrade to WS2022.
<UPDATED EDIT> In response to your feedback we have announced support for M365 on Windows Server 2022, please see this link for additional information:
Windows Server end of support and Microsoft 365 Apps - Deploy Office | Microsoft Learn
Again, thank you for your feedback and passion!!
Elden Christensen
Principal Group PM Manager
Windows Server Development Team
MicrosoftFirst off I would like to thank everyone for the feedback and apologize for the delay in responding to this thread. Your feedback has made a difference, and sparked many internal discussions... we have customers running M365 on WS2016 and WS2019 today, and we want to enable staying current and secure being able to upgrade to WS2022.
<UPDATED EDIT> In response to your feedback we have announced support for M365 on Windows Server 2022, please see this link for additional information:
Windows Server end of support and Microsoft 365 Apps - Deploy Office | Microsoft Learn
Again, thank you for your feedback and passion!!
Elden Christensen
Principal Group PM Manager
Windows Server Development Team
Dear EldenChristensen please keep in mind, within your internal discussions, that in case Microsoft would decide to support M365 Apps on Windows Server 2022, this would be a welcome change for some scenarios.
On the other hand, and quite importantly, Microsoft should consider this decision would be the second time that the support of M365 Apps revoked from Windows Server would be reinstated later. As it happened with Windows Server 2019.
Back then the decision was a good one for several reasons:
- WS 2016 has bugged servicing stack taking ages to patch
- WS 2019 has several improvements to start and search / indexing making it easier to implement RDS or Citrix based multi-session use. Next to said servicing improvements and other things.
- the alternatives to cope with the revoke weren't up to par and not that versatile as they appear now in terms of technical excellence and licensing.
If Microsoft would change this decision and support M365 apps on Windows Server 2022, this would absolutely destroy the credibility to plan budgets and lifecycles based on roadmaps published by the Office team.
This time there is little reason, as many functional and cost effective alternatives to RDS exist.
In terms of licensing, starting from October 1st which Microsoft supposed to loosen the VDI licensing requirements and make it easy to either host VDI on-premises on any hypervisor or in Azure using Windows 10/11 Pro / Ent while user are licensed with M365 E3/E5/Fx etc.
Alternatively, hosting Azure Virtual Desktop on Azure Stack HCI on-premises will be a great option.
Even external hosting M365 apps within SPLA and on shared hardware could become an option starting from October 1st without QMTH provider requirements.
So before taking any u-turn, please consider these announced licensing changes, and rate their effectiveness, in addition to feedback from customers and / or partners to revert to "status quo".
Thanks for your time and consideration!
I feel you, and agree it is quite uncertain what happens with Office LTSC, especially since Office 2022 LTSC release is quiet.
Just want to make clear that AzureStackHCI + AVD would be one option. Not intended to say it is the option.
"no one is on physical anymore"
In my posts and replies I always assume we are talking about virtualized workloads, too.
Repeating myself wait for October and check licensing terms before further decisions and conclusions on the matter. We need to have it written (and stable) in the product terms what is going to happen.- My current hypervisors can do all that too (with RDS on VMs, no one is on physical anymore) cheaper than Azure HCI, and in some cases it's unnecessary due to RDS hosting multiple users in one OS, so code is only loaded once, why do we need memory dedupe in that case anyway?
If I felt Microsoft would guarantee always releasing an LTSC of Office that would connect to 365 services, I'd feel better about M365 apps not being supported on Server, but I have the feeling (and don't tell me I'm crazy and it will never happen - people are wrong about those things all the time) that Microsoft will eventually say "sorry, no more Office LTSC, you gotta run 365 and if that means you gotta run on Azure VD then I guess that's your problem!" That's a situation we DON'T want to happen. Well as always it depends. We have things like memory compression and dynamic memory and thin provisioning + Dedup on storage level. At least all of this is included in the licensing cost for Azure Stack HCI or even traditional Hyper-V. So VDI could be quite effective, and more performant compared to RDS, but at least also more secure and flexible.
For me it is no pain that M365 and 2012R2 are not supported, as simply WS 2012R2 is not supported for mainstream, as well as WS 2016 is no longer supported.
I am well aware of the awkward situation when you are trying to open a support ticket with Microsoft and the qualified OS is in extended support.
It is nothing for everyday business. Let alone you have a potential cross product issue, like you might think it is your Windows Server causing FSLogix issue, or OneDrive or M365 apps.
My point is Microsoft should stop supporting M365 from any Windows Server as it is by now.
It is a Server OS, not a user OS, albeit they are quite similar. WS vNext (maybe released around 2023-2024) seems to the Windows 11 GUI, which is welcome in some parts and consistency but still suprising to me.
For RDS, if you really need it the same way, you could step back to the Office LTSC version and licensing.
One reason the Office Team keeps trying to avoid supporting M365 on any LTSC serviced Windows OS, including Windows Server, is the non-matching support matrix of both products. No matter if you are using M365 on deferred or current channels.
Please look forward for the licensing changes coming October 1st, which should offer alternatives for these not seeing the need to switch to AVD on AzureStackHCI on-premises but need to host VDI on-premises.kwester-ebbinghaus-businesswhy are you so against Microsoft supporting M365 apps on Windows Server? There aren't as many good alternatives to RDS as you claim, especially for those of us using on-prem hosting that is not Azure Stack HCI. We shouldn't be forced to run MS virtualization either in their cloud or on-prem to run M365 apps.
I'm not saying MS shouldn't change their M365 apps system requirements to start to require newer versions of Windows Server sooner rather than later when they go out of support, I think that's a reasonable ask, as they already did with 2012R2 which still receives security updates but can't support latest M365 apps. BUT we want RDS on WS to continue to be supported for running them, it is stable, it is performant and less resource-intensive than many different W10 desktops.
