Proposal: drop support for Hyper-V 2008R2

[Andrea Bolognani]

On Fri, 2020-10-30 at 07:02 -0400, Matt Coleman wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I've been getting familiar with Hyper-V recently and have gotten 
> stymied by inconsistencies in its API.
> 
> While Hyper-V has V1 and V2 APIs, neither one is consistent between 
> Windows versions. For example...
> * Windows 2012 only supports a subset of the V2 API
> * Windows 2012 implements some V1 functions differently than 2008R2
> * Windows 2016 broke compatibility with 2012R2 by replacing some classes
> 
> Some of these differences are undocumented, too, which is just lovely.
> 
> Most of these changes are relatively easy to handle, but the 
> differences between 2008R2's and 2012's implementations of the V1 API 
> result in libvirt code with a lot of conditionals containing obscure 
> format strings in the 2008R2 blocks.
> 
> Windows 2008R2's extended support ended January 14, 2020:
> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-server-2008-r2
> 
> Windows 2012's mainstream support ended in 2018, but it still has 
> extended support through October 10, 2023:
> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-server-2012
> 
> Since 2008R2 is no longer supported by Microsoft, I propose removing 
> support for it from libvirt.

Dropping 2008R2 support is a no-brainer.

Can we got further? Our policy[1] for Linux is

  The project aims to support the most recent major version at all
  times. Support for the previous major version will be dropped 2
  years after the new major version is released or when the vendor
  itself drops support, whichever comes first. 

If we adopted the same policy for Windows Server[2], then we could
drop support for 2012R2 today and support for 2016 in the next
release.

Is there a good reason why we should *not* do that?


[1] https://libvirt.org/platforms.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_versions#Server_versions
-- 
Andrea Bolognani / Red Hat / Virtualization