Microsoft Windows Server 2025 adds to its cloud service offerings and boosts performance and security.
Microsoft has announced the general availability of Windows Server 2025. With Azure’s growing market share of cloud services, the flagship enterprise operating system has made significant strides in integrating its cloud service offerings. Microsoft also boasts improvements in security and performance.
Security Advancements
With cybercrime reports making the news far too regularly, information security is of the utmost importance. Windows Server 2025 includes robust security features to keep companies and their data secure.
One of the standout security features is native hardening for File Services/Server Message Block (SMB). Windows Server 2025 includes SMB over QUIC, a protocol enabling secure access to file shares over the internet. Enhanced SMB security includes hardened firewall defaults, protection against brute force attacks, and defenses against ‘man-in-the-middle,’ relay, and spoofing attacks.
Active Directory updates include features like Delegates Managed Service Accounts (dMSA). Unlike traditional service accounts, dMSAs don’t require manual password management since AD automatically handles it. dMSAs allow specific permissions to be delegated for domain resources, reducing security risks and enhancing visibility and logging of service account activity.
Cloud Agility
Windows Server 2025 revolutionizes hybrid cloud capabilities with several advanced features that enhance operational flexibility. A standout addition is hot-patching. This subscription service, enabled by Azure Arc, Microsoft’s hybrid cloud management solution, allows on-premises customers to experience fewer reboots and minimal disruption during updates. This is complemented by simplified Azure Arc onboarding and enhanced software-defined network features that offer native L2 and L3 connectivity for seamless workload migration across locations.
Beyond security and cloud agility, Windows Server 2025 also significantly enhances performance and scalability, with the platform showing impressive improvements in storage capabilities. The system delivers up to 60% more storage IOPs performance than Windows Server 2022 while introducing native Resilient File System (ReFS) deduplication and compression, thinly provisioned Storage Spaces, and Storage Replica Compression across all editions. These enhancements support various storage solutions, from local to NAS and SAN configurations.
The new release is specifically optimized for AI and machine learning workloads, featuring built-in support for GPU partitioning and distributed data processing capabilities. Hyper-V has been enhanced with significant performance and scalability improvements derived from Azure, making Windows Server 2025 a robust platform for both traditional applications and advanced AI workloads, complete with live migration and high availability features.
Closing Thoughts
Windows Server 2025 introduces comprehensive improvements to its core infrastructure components, including enhanced Hyper-V capabilities, streamlined GPU integration, upgraded Storage Spaces Direct, refined software-defined networking, and advanced clustering features. These substantial updates position it as an ideal platform for traditional virtualization needs and cutting-edge AI/ML workloads, offering organizations the performance and scalability required for modern computing demands.
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