News

Windows Server 2025 Now Generally Available

• By Chris Paoli
• November 06, 2024

Microsoft's next-gen server platform, Windows Server 2025, is now ready for production environments, the company announced Monday.

Windows Server 2025 will support hybrid, cloud and on-premises workloads with equal effectiveness, Microsoft promised. It also comes with multiple security perks, including new hotpatching capabilities.

Built for the Cloud
Windows Server 2025 has been primed for hybrid deployments, per Microsoft, making it "an ideal choice for organizations looking to optimize their IT infrastructure and leverage the benefits of both on-premises and cloud environments." Some new features include:

• Hotpatching via Azure Arc: Available through a subscription service, hotpatching delivers security updates with minimal downtime across Windows Server 2025 environments.
• Simplified Azure Arc Onboarding: With an easier onboarding process, Azure's management capabilities extend to on-premises environments, providing users with seamless control over hybrid and multicloud deployments.
• Software-Defined Network (SDN) Multisite Features: New SDN capabilities support workload migration across locations and enhance network policy management, providing IT administrators with centralized control.
• Unified Network Policy Management: This feature enables centralized management of network policies, simplifying the process of maintaining consistent security and performance.

Secure for Every Environment
Windows Server 2025 looks to capitalize on Microsoft's "prioritize security above all else" initiative by including new features that focus on the company's key core principles: secure by design, secure by default and secure operations.

Microsoft highlighted some of these key new features in its Monday announcement:

• Active Directory (AD): The gold standard for identity and authentication only gets better with new security capabilities to help fortify your environment against evolving threats with greater scalability and improvements in protocols, encryption, hardening, and new cryptographic support.
• File services/server message block (SMB) hardening: Windows Server 2025 includes SMB over QUIC to enable secure access to file shares over the internet. SMB security also adds hardened firewall defaults, brute force attack prevention, and protections for man in the middle attacks, relay attacks, and spoofing attacks.
• Delegate Managed Service Accounts (dMSA): Unlike traditional service accounts, dMSAs don't require manual password management since AD automatically takes care of it. With dMSAs, specific permissions can be delegated to access resources in the domain, which reduces security risks and provides better visibility and logs of service account activity.

AI and Performance Boost
Windows Server 2025 introduces significant AI and performance enhancements, particularly through updates to Hyper-V. With increased memory and processor limits, virtual machines can now use up to 240 terabytes of memory and 2,048 virtual processors, vastly expanding their capacity to support resource-intensive workloads, according to Microsoft. These improvements position the platform as an ideal choice for demanding applications, from AI-driven processes to large-scale data analytics.

In addition, Windows Server 2025 enhances storage capabilities with NVMe technology, delivering up to 60 percent faster storage IOPS compared to Windows Server 2022, according to Microsoft's internal testing. The company said this boost addresses the needs of data-intensive applications, while innovations in Storage Spaces Direct allow for flexible storage configurations. The inclusion of deduplication and compression through the Native ReFS file system further optimizes storage efficiency, making it easier for organizations to manage large volumes of data across various deployment setups.

"These improvements make Windows Server 2025 an excellent option for organizations looking for a virtualization solution and for organizations looking to leverage AI and machine learning while maintaining high performance and scalability," Microsoft said.

System Center 2025 is also now available, for organizations upgrading to Windows Server 2025.

Launch Bugs
Microsoft has acknowledged a few current issues when installing or upgrading to Windows Server 2025. First, for non-English-speaking customers installing Windows Server 2025 from a CD or USB, some text might appear in English.

Next, for those running Windows Server 2025 on servers with 256 or more logical processors, users may experience startup times longer than three hours or a blue screen crash when starting or running an application. Microsoft said that while it troubleshoots a solution for these issues, users can manually set the number of logical processors to under 256 to avoid the errors.

Finally, those running Windows Server 2025 on iSCSI (Internet Small Computer Systems Interface) technology might encounter an error message at startup saying, "Boot device inaccessible." Microsoft said a fix for this will arrive in a future monthly update.