Hopefully switching because of unreliability of vendor and lack of future support and vision would be a good enough reason. But I guess it would be against the license agreement, since using WSUS in production environment is far from evaluation concept. I've been thinking about running virtualized 180-day trial version of 2008 R2 and run WSUS on it. Virtualization - yes, I've been considering it. I believe the developer will have 圆4 version with time - there's no escape from 圆4 architecture. Besides the migration costs would be hard to estimate and completely pointless for my boss. We're using this app for 4 years, users are used to this app, switching to another one only because of WSUS (which is something completely transparent to them) would be impossible to explain. Swiching to another vendor is easy to say, but not an option. App developer said there is not enough interest in 64-bit version, so I have to stick to 32-bit until they have change of heart in this matter.
The perfect solution would be running both WSUS and our business app on new server, but as far as I see, it's not possible. There are also other minor reasons why I want to retire it.
Repairing it is not an option - replacing mobo will not let me install OS, because it's OEM.
Now I'm pretty clueless, since I cannot leave WSUS running on old server, because it has hardware (mobo) problems and crashes often. I tried to download and install WSUS for x86 architecture, but it refused installation saying it cannot be installed in WoW 32-bit emulation. The problem is that I also use WSUS, which will not work with 32-bit workers - it refused to work after switching to 32-emulation, and trying uninstalling it and installing again led to obvious failure. The app doesn't work with 64-bit worker on new server, fortunately there's way to switch IIS7 workers to run in 32-bit emulation mode, which let me install the app and make it running. We have a very essential IIS app, that was running on previous SBS2003 (32-bit), and the app is 32-bt only. I'm just in the middle of migration to new server based on Windows 2008 R2 Std.