We are excited to announce that Windows Server 2025 is available in public preview and ready for you to download in the Evaluation Center. This is the latest in our Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) releases, and it’s scheduled to be generally available later this calendar year. Feedback from customers like you has helped us transform Windows Server 2025 into what we hope you’ll agree is our most secure and innovative version yet. This release delivers advanced security, new Azure hybrid features, a high-performance platform for your existing apps and AI workloads, and a modernized Windows Server experience. Read on for just a few highlights,1 then try it for yourself.
Advanced security
With a growing number of cyber security threats and the impact of incidents escalating quickly, security is a top priority for our customers. Windows Server 2025 includes a rich set of security innovations, including:
- Modern, scalable identity management with new security capabilities in Active Directory.
- Server Message Block (SMB) improvements including SMB over QUIC and features to help protect against brute force attacks, spoofing, and relay attacks.
- Security updates with fewer reboots, made possible through Azure Arc-enabled hotpatching, new security capabilities in Active Directory, and SMB hardening.
Hybrid innovation
We’re continuing to hear from our customers that the majority of their organizations work in a hybrid or multicloud state. In fact, a recent survey we conducted revealed that 81% of current hybrid cloud customers expect to remain hybrid for another five years.2 Now, you can innovate and govern anywhere, as Windows Server 2025 delivers improved hybrid cloud capabilities such as:
- Software-defined network (SDN) multisite features allow for native L2 and L3 connectivity for workloads in multiple locations, and the ease of unified network policy management.
- Flexible hybrid and multicloud management tools that bring Azure capabilities to your datacenter through Azure Arc.
- If you want to use Azure hybrid capabilities but haven’t started yet, Windows Server 2025 has features that allow easier onboarding to Azure Arc.
AI, performance, and scale
Are you curious about how your organization can do more with AI? Well, you’ve come to the right place! Azure hosts some of the world’s largest workloads that push the limits of CPU and memory capabilities to process huge data sets across distributed environments. With the growth of AI and machine learning, GPUs have become a key part of cloud solutions because they’re great at performing many parallel operations on large data. Windows Server 2025 brings you many of these advantages across GPUs, storage, networking, and scalability. New features include:
- GPU partitioning across virtual machines with live migration and failover clustering; built to support AI workloads and inferencing at the edge.
- Reductions in the time you spend on network setup and issue remediation with new Network Adaptive Traffic Control (ATC) and Network Health and Usage Dashboard (HUD) features.
- Massive increases in storage performance and vastly improved Hyper-V performance and scalability.3
What we’ve provided above is just a quick overview of our top improvement areas for Windows Server 2025. For more details, we encourage you to read more on Microsoft Learn and watch our 2024 Windows Server Summit on demand.
System Center 2025
We’re also excited to announce the launch of System Center 2025, a leap forward in infrastructure management, enabling you to make the most of the Windows Server 2025 features from “day 0”. Advanced security focus continues to be a theme for System Center 2025 as well, featuring Azure Key Vault integration and reduced NTLM and Credential Security Support Provider protocol (CredSSP) usage. For hybrid innovation, onboarding machines in your System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) managed datacenters to Azure Arc is simplified with Azure Arc-enabled SCVMM. In addition to at-scale Arc onboarding, it also enables you to manage the lifecycle of the machines in your datacenter in a self-service fashion from Azure.
Try out the new Windows Server 2025 preview
Today we’ve shared some of the new features and capabilities of Windows Server 2025. They’re the outcome of more than 30 years of working on refining and updating the Windows Server platform based on