We are excited to announce that Windows Server 2025 is to be had in public preview and able so that you can obtain within the Evaluation Center. This is the newest in our Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) releases, and it’s scheduled to be normally to be had later this calendar yr. Feedback from shoppers such as you has helped us develop into Windows Server 2025 into what we are hoping you’ll agree is our maximum safe and cutting edge model but. This liberate delivers complex safety, new Azure hybrid options, a high-performance platform on your present apps and AI workloads, and a modernized Windows Server enjoy. Read on for only some highlights,¹ then check out it for your self. 

Advanced safety

With a rising collection of cyber safety threats and the affect of incidents escalating temporarily, safety is a most sensible precedence for our shoppers. Windows Server 2025 features a wealthy set of safety inventions, together with:

• Modern, scalable identification control with new safety features in Active Directory.
• Server Message Block (SMB) enhancements together with SMB over QUIC and lines to lend a hand offer protection to in opposition to brute power assaults, spoofing, and relay assaults.
• Security updates with fewer reboots, made imaginable thru Azure Arc-enabled hotpatching, new safety features in Active Directory, and SMB hardening.

Hybrid innovation

We’re proceeding to listen to from our shoppers that almost all in their organizations paintings in a hybrid or multicloud state. In truth, a contemporary survey we carried out published that 81% of present hybrid cloud shoppers be expecting to stay hybrid for any other 5 years.² Now, you’ll innovate and govern any place, as Windows Server 2025 delivers progressed hybrid cloud features similar to:

• Software-defined community (SDN) multisite options permit for local L2 and L3 connectivity for workloads in a couple of places, and the convenience of unified community coverage control.
• Flexible hybrid and multicloud control equipment that deliver Azure features on your datacenter thru Azure Arc.
• If you need to make use of Azure hybrid features however haven’t began but, Windows Server 2025 has options that let more uncomplicated onboarding to Azure Arc.

AI, functionality, and scale

Are you interested in how your company can do extra with AI? Well, you’ve come to the precise position! Azure hosts one of the international’s biggest workloads that push the boundaries of CPU and reminiscence features to procedure massive information units throughout dispensed environments. With the expansion of AI and gadget studying, GPUs have change into a key a part of cloud answers as a result of they’re nice at appearing many parallel operations on massive information. Windows Server 2025 brings you several of those benefits throughout GPUs, garage, networking, and scalability. New options come with:

• GPU partitioning throughout digital machines with reside migration and failover clustering; constructed to fortify AI workloads and inferencing on the edge.
• Reductions within the time you spend on community setup and factor remediation with new Network Adaptive Traffic Control (ATC) and Network Health and Usage Dashboard (HUD) options.
• Massive will increase in garage functionality and massively progressed Hyper-V functionality and scalability.³
• Easy upgrades thru Windows Update.

What we’ve supplied above is only a fast evaluate of our most sensible growth spaces for Windows Server 2025. For extra main points, we inspire you to learn extra on Microsoft Learn and watch our 2024 Windows Server Summit on call for.

Windows Server shoppers on the vanguard

While Windows Server 2025 is most effective entering its public preview now, we’d love to proportion only some inspiring buyer tales you will have ignored, that will help you plot the adventure forward:

• CTT – Correios de Portugal: Learn how a company that’s been round since 1520 will get able for AI.

• Hokkoku Bank: This financial institution laid the preliminary groundwork for modernization by means of transferring its complete on-premises property to Windows Server. This created a unbroken trail to complete cloud transformation on Microsoft Azure.

• DICK’s Sporting Goods: This Windows Server buyer created an omnichannel athlete enjoy the use of Azure Arc and Azure Kubernetes Service.

System Center 2025

We’re additionally excited to announce the release of System Center 2025, a bounce ahead in infrastructure control, enabling you to profit from the Windows Server 2025 options from “day 0”. Advanced safety center of attention remains to be a theme for System Center 2025 as smartly, that includes Azure Key Vault integration and lowered NTLM and Credential Security Support Provider protocol (CredSSP) utilization. For hybrid innovation, onboarding machines to your System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) controlled datacenters to Azure Arc is simplified with Azure Arc-enabled SCVMM. In addition to at-scale Arc onboarding, it additionally allows you to organize the lifecycle of the machines to your datacenter in a self-service model from Azure. 

Try out the brand new Windows Server 2025 preview

Today we’ve shared one of the new options and features of Windows Server 2025. They’re the end result of greater than 30 years of operating on, refining, and updating the Windows Server platform in response to enter from devoted execs such as you. Thank you for being a treasured Windows Server buyer and, thru your pastime and comments, serving to us form this new liberate. For extra main points, learn this Windows Server documentation, watch our Windows Server Summit classes, or take a look at the “What’s ahead for Windows 2025” video.

Download the Windows Server 2025 preview.

¹This knowledge pertains to a prerelease product that can be considerably changed prior to it’s launched. Microsoft makes no warranties, expressed or implied, with appreciate to the ideas supplied right here.

²Based on a 2023 Microsoft survey of Windows Server shoppers the use of hybrid cloud of their group. N=197.

³Up to 70% extra IOPs on NVMe SSDs; Windows Server 2025 Hyper-V Virtual Machine Maximums: Maximum Memory in step with VM: 240 Terabytes* (10x earlier) ; Maximum Virtual Processors in step with VM: 2048 VPs* (~8.5x earlier) *Requires Generation 2 VMs ; Windows Server 2025 Host Memory Maximums: 4 Petabytes for hosts that fortify 5 degree paging (166x earlier) ; 256 Terabytes for hosts that fortify 4 degree paging (10x earlier)