At some point Veritas will *have to* provide a working and supported upgrade path for its customers. All newer SQL Server releases are only made available in 64-bit editions. SQL Server 2014 is the last version made available for 32-bit at all and reaching end of mainstream support this year. It's really disappointing to realize that in 2019 with the new BE 20.4 Veritas still ships SQL 2014 32-bit while BE itself has been 64-bit only since BE15 (that's 2 major releases by now). After some time working with the Veritas support I thought I could share some details nonetheless: If your company plans on migrating from SQL 2014 globally to 2016 or newer, currently upgrading a SQL instance installed and used by BE isn't going to be easy even possible right now. Hence my question about what versions are actually supported by Veritas in this case - and where I can find about. Ideally I'd like to upgrade to SQL Server 2017, then again if Veritas doesn't support new SQL Server for the BKUPEXEC instance it wouldn't be worth the effort. The BE 20.3 admin guide mentions SQL Server 2014 Express SP2 as minmum requirement, however I haven't found an indication what newer versions of SQL Server (Express) are supported for the BKUPEXEC instance.

Thus I'd like to get all our DB instances upgraded in time - where possible to the same versions on the whole infastructure so that we have to keep an eye on less software version to keep patched and maintained.

Even if the extended maintenance support continues, MS will definitely limit their efforts for 2014 in favour of 2016 and newer. I'm doing overall upgrade planning on our infrastructure and saw SQL Server 2014 SP3 will get out of mainstream support in july 2019 identified which systems still run this version, Backup Exec server being one of them. I've recently finally finished upgrading from BE 16 to 20.3, so far so good, SQL Server 2014 remains the default version that BE 20 relies on for the BKUPEXEC instance.

Sql server 2014 express advanced