Windows Server 2025 with Security, Enhanced Performance, and Cloud Agility

by Sangeetha | Apr 12, 2025 | Operating System, Uncategorized

Windows Server 2025

Microsoft marks the general availability of Windows Server 2025, which enhances our commitment to providing a secure and high-performance platform tailored to meet the diverse needs of our customers. This release allows you to deploy applications across various environments, including on-premises, hybrid, and cloud setups.

Advanced Multilayered Security

In a time when cybersecurity is critical (as highlighted in the Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024 and the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Healthcare Ransomware Report), Windows Server 2025 introduces a comprehensive suite of security features designed to protect your data and infrastructure. Key capabilities include:

Active Directory (AD): The benchmark for identity and authentication continues to evolve with enhanced security features that strengthen your environment against emerging threats. Improvements in scalability, protocols, encryption, and cryptographic support are included.

SMB Hardening: This version incorporates SMB over QUIC, enabling secure internet access to file shares. Additional security measures include fortified firewall defaults, prevention against brute force attacks, and safeguards against man-in-the-middle, relay, and spoofing attacks.

Delegated Managed Service Accounts (dMSA): Unlike traditional service accounts, dMSAs automate password management through AD, reducing security risks. They allow for specific permissions to be delegated for resource access, enhancing visibility and logging of service account activities.

These advanced security features position Windows Server 2025 as a robust platform for your IT infrastructure, making it essential to start evaluating it now.

Cloud Agility Anywhere

Windows Server 2025 also introduces several advanced hybrid cloud capabilities aimed at improving operational flexibility and connectivity across different environments. Notable features include:

Hotpatching via Azure Arc: This new subscription service brings cloud-like security advantages, such as automatic updates and backup recovery, to on-premises customers. Hotpatching minimizes disruptions by allowing security updates with fewer reboots for Azure Arc-enabled Windows Server 2025 Standard or Datacenter, whether on physical machines, virtual machines, or in multicloud setups. Currently in preview, this feature will require a monthly subscription but incurs no additional cost for Windows Server Datacenter Azure Edition virtual machines.

Simplified Azure Arc Onboarding: Windows Server 2025 integrates Azure’s powerful capabilities directly into your datacenter, streamlining the onboarding process for Azure’s hybrid features. This enhances operational flexibility, enabling more effective management and security of hybrid and multicloud environments.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) Multisite Features: These features provide native L2 and L3 connectivity for seamless workload migration across locations, along with unified network policy management.

Unified Network Policy Management: This capability allows for centralized control of network policies, facilitating consistent security and performance standards across your hybrid cloud environment.

With these hybrid cloud capabilities, Windows Server 2025 is an excellent choice for organizations aiming to optimize their IT infrastructure and harness the advantages of both on-premises and cloud environments.

AI, Performance, and Scalability

Windows Server 2025 is engineered to manage the most demanding workloads, including those related to AI and machine learning. Here are some of its standout features:

Hyper-V, AI, and Machine Learning: With integrated support for GPU partitioning and the capability to process extensive datasets across distributed environments, Windows Server 2025 provides a high-performance platform suitable for both traditional applications and advanced AI tasks, featuring live migration and high availability.

NVMe Storage Performance: This version offers up to 60% more storage IOPS compared to Windows Server 2022 on similar systems, based on 4K random reads using Diskspd 2.2 with Kioxia CM7 SSDs.

Storage Spaces Direct and Flexibility: Windows Server has long supported a variety of storage solutions, including local, NAS, and SAN. With Windows Server 2025, you’ll find enhanced storage innovations such as Native ReFS deduplication and compression, thinly provisioned Storage Spaces, and Storage Replica Compression available across all editions.

Hyper-V Performance and Scalability: Significant enhancements derived from Azure have been introduced, including:

Maximum Memory per VM: Up to 240 Terabytes (10 times the previous limit).
Maximum Virtual Processors per VM: Up to 2048 VPs (approximately 8.5 times the previous limit).
Note: These improvements require Generation 2 VMs.

Windows Server 2025 brings substantial advancements in Hyper-V, GPU integration, Storage Spaces Direct (software-defined storage), software-defined networking, and clustering. These enhancements make it an excellent choice for organizations seeking virtualization solutions while leveraging AI and machine learning with high performance and scalability.

System Center 2025

Alongside Windows Server 2025, System Center 2025 is also available, enabling immediate management of Windows Server at scale. This release is designed to improve agility, performance, and security, helping organizations optimize their infrastructure and virtualized software-defined datacenters. For more details, we encourage you to check out the System Center 2025 post.

Microsoft Ignite 2024

We’re excited to meet you in person at Microsoft Ignite in Chicago from November 19-21, where we’ll showcase these and other features of Windows Server 2025 at our sessions and booth. For those unable to attend, many sessions, including our breakout titled “Windows Server 2025: New Ways to Gain Cloud Agility and Security,” will be available for online viewing.

Additionally, we’re thrilled to introduce new features for existing Windows Server versions, including 2016, 2019, and 2022, as well as 2025. Customers with Windows Server Software Assurance or active subscriptions can access Azure management tools like Azure Update Manager, Azure Policy Guest Configuration, Disaster Recovery, Change Tracking, and Inventory, with many features available at no extra cost. Be sure to tune into Microsoft Ignite for more demos and information on accessing these new offerings.

Key Features and Enhancements

Performance and Security Improvements

Comparison with Previous Versions

Windows Server 2025 represents a significant leap forward compared to its predecessors. Below is a detailed comparison:

Use Cases and Applications

Windows Server 2025 is ideal for a variety of applications, including:

Finally,

Server Maintenance

Storage Maintenance

Network Maintenance

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New Microsoft Windows Server 2022 OS

by Sangeetha | Mar 30, 2021 | Operating System

Microsoft Windows Server 2022 OS released

Microsoft Server 2022 to help organizations accelerate application modernization. Some of the new features are

Advanced multilayer Security
Hybrid Cloud Integration with Azure
Containerized Applications

Secured-core

Secured Core brings advanced hardware security to Server and Edge which brings an all-encompassing secured server by requiring hardware and software vendors to follow security best-practices of the OS.

Azure Automanage

Support for on-prem Windows Server in Azure Automanage. Means you can now do rebootless patching of managed machines with Azure Automanage and Windows Server

Windows Admin Center Version 2103

Windows Admin Center is the new way to manage Windows Server. The old RSAT tools still available

Windows Admin Center 2103 functionality includes:

Public Preview of Windows Admin Center running in Microsoft Azure
Automatic Updates for WAC and its Extensions
Support for Outbound Proxies
Windows Event Viewer Overhaul

SERVER Core Container

Windows Server Core container images are 40% smaller and startup times to Windows PowerShell are 30-45% faster.

Windows Server Core container images are used for

scaling apps,
continuous integration and
continuous delivery (CI/CD),
situations where images are pulled without using a Docker image cache or where faster startup times are required.

Container Images

To reduce Server Core container image sizes by including a smaller set of NGEN images by decreasing image size and maintaining startup performance

NGEN images are a series of precompiled .NET native images that are generated using a tool called Ngen.exe to improve startup performance. NGEN was the culprit for increased image size.

To achieve its goals for the Windows Server Core base image layer, Microsoft made the following changes:

Included a serviced copy of .NET Framework 4.8.
Removed all NGEN images, except for mscorlib.dll, System.dll and System.Core.dll (32-bit and 64-bit).

In the .NET Framework runtime image layer, the changes are as follows:

Included NGEN assemblies used by Windows PowerShell and ASP.NET only.
Included only NGEN 64-bit assemblies.

Better application compatibility

Windows Server 2019: Brought the optional Server Core ‘App Compatibility’ Feature on Demand. It lets applications run in Server Core that would normally require the desktop experience to be installed.

Windows Server 2022: Allow organizations to run globally scalable apps with virtualized time zones, and even run apps that depend on Active Directory (AD) without joining the container hosts to the domain.

Group Managed Service Accounts for Active Directory support

Containers can’t be joined to AD, but they can still use AD domain accounts to support authentication. A Windows container can run with a group Managed Service Account (gMSA). gMSAs let multiple computers share an identity without needing to know its password.

When a container is configured to run using a gMSA, the container host gets the gMSA password from Active Directory and passes it to the container. The container then uses the gMSA credential when its computer account (SYSTEM) needs to access network resources.

Virtualized time zones

An update in Microsoft Server 2022 will allow you to set the time zone in container instances using the tzutil command line tool, by setting the virtual registry key, or by specifying the time zone using a Docker/AKS (Azure Kubernetes Service) argument.

Windows Admin Center container tool

The Windows Admin Center (WAC) container extension is now a fully paid-up member of the team and it is available as an out-of-the-box tool. The container tool lets you get Windows and Linux containers up and running quickly. Also another option to migrate legacy Windows Server ASP.NET, WebDeploy, .NET, and MSI applications to the Azure container registry, allowing you deploy apps in Azure and Azure Stack HCI.

Container tool in Windows Admin Center (WAC)

The container tool in WAC lets administrators containerize existing applications by answering a few simple questions. The tool then generates the necessary Docker file with instructions on how to create the container image. Once the Docker file has been generated, you can either run the image locally or push it to an external container registry.

Deploy consistent network policy with Calico across hybrid Kubernetes clusters

Calico is an open-source container networking solution created by Tigera. Kubernetes doesn’t manage network connectivity between containers. Container Networking Interface (CNI) plugins, like Calico, enable full network connectivity between cluster nodes. But full network connectivity between nodes can introduce security risks. Tools like Calico use the Kubernates NetworkPolicy API to apply consistent network policy.

A problem with Windows worker node support in Kubernetes is that Calico, one of the most popular network policy tools, doesn’t support Windows. That is until now. With the release of Calico version 3.16, Windows containers can be deployed and secured in Azure, other cloud providers, and on-premises using the network components in Windows Server and Calico network policy. Furthermore, you can take the containers you deployed in AKS and deploy them in Azure Stack HCI. They will just work, be fully compliant, and can be managed from the cloud using Azure Arc.

If you’re interested in trying the new version of Windows Admin Center, you can call us.

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