@Srini Krish Firstly Apologies for the delay response!
"StorSimple Virtual Array (1200 series) will reach its end-of-life in December 2022" Does this apply only to the 1200 series appliance or even for Hype-V hosted virtual instance ?
Correct, StorSimple is EOL December 2022. that was announced in 2019 on ACOM pages and official Microsoft EOL site. The service will be turned off, so the appliance may run for some time, but without the service, no admin plane, you can't manage the appliance. that means you couldn't restore a backup for instance(Hype-V hosted virtual instance). so you should start planning and executing on migration asap.
Are they phasing out the StorSimple service itself completely ? Yes
There is no distinction between "1200 series appliance" and "Hyper-V hosted virtual instance of 1200 series appliance" 1200 series StorSimple devices of all kinds are reaching their EOL in December
Azure StorSimple 1200 Series: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/azure-storsimple-1200-series
Note: StorSimple Virtual Array (1200 series) will reach its end-of-life in December 2022. If you are considering new deployments of StorSimple Virtual Array, we recommend that you explore other alternatives such as Azure File Sync or Azure Data Box Online devices for your workloads.
StorSimple Virtual Array best practices
Please let us know if you have any further queries. I’m happy to assist you further.
----------
Please do not forget to and “up-vote” wherever the information provided helps you, this can be beneficial to other community members.