Does anyone have any positive experience migrating a VM running Windows Server 2003 SB SP2 x86 to Azure?

Question

I was faced with the task of transferring a very old Windows Server 2003 for Small Business SP2 x86 VM from VMWare 5 to Azure.

This VM contains software that is quite unique and has not been supported for a very long time, but nevertheless the client wants it to work this VM as a cold archive.

I tried to migrate in different ways but every time the VM starts to reboot cyclically in a Normal mode but can boot normally in a Safe mode.

Of course, this operating system has not been supported for a very long time.

I tried to perform a local migration to Hyper-V 2012R2 and the exact same situation repeated itself: instant reboot at the very beginning without logging the boot process into Ntbtlog.txt with "black screen and blinking text cursor".

Previously installed the 2012 vmguest package from Hyper-V 2012, removed all the VMWare drivers,
Also tried to create a Hyper-V VM with V5 configuration, disable PAE etc.

But, everything is fine with Windows Server 2003 R2, it works without problems on the 2012 Hyper-V and is also seamlessly transferred to the Azure cloud.

I found an old 2003 SBS server iso without SP and tried to deploy a clean virtual machine on a Hyper-V Server 2012 with exactly the same result.

Most likely the kernel of the old 2003 SBS cannot work with the 2012+ Hyper-V in normal mode, but suddenly someone managed to make it work.

What confuses me is that in safe mode with support for network drivers, the VM boots without problems, but when I try to boot in normal mode it crashes immediately without any logging or BSOD (the pause option on failure was enabled).

I would be very grateful if someone would share their positive experience in this matter.