Microsoft Windows Server 2025 is the new release of the Microsoft server operating system. It will facilitate a fast, scalable and secure environment that serves the interests of businesses of all sizes. Continuing a legacy of its forerunners, Windows Server 2025 offers a multitude of new features, enhancements, and improvements that help organizations reshape their IT infrastructures, enable effortless operations, and elevate digital transformation.

Windows Server 2025 also brings along an amazing compilation of high-tech security features to keep your organization safe from becoming prey to cyber threats. These include:

● Advanced Threat Protection: An inbuilt detection and response system against cyber threats employing machine learning and AI for detection, mitigation work in real-time.

● Windows Defender ATP: A cloud hosted service for extended threat detection, incident response, and threat hunting.

● Secure Boot: A mechanism ensuring boot process integrity, which guards against the launching of malware and unauthorized firmware.

Windows Server 2025 proposes a hybrid cloud experience with effortless integration of workloads for deployment and management on-premises, cloud, and edge environments. Some of the features are as follows:

● Azure Arc: A set of cloud-based services that enable you to manage and govern your hybrid cloud environment from a single glass panel.

● Azure Stack HCI: Hyperconverged infrastructure solution to deploy Azure Services on-premises.

● Cloud witness: A feature that allows you to use Azure as a witness for your failover cluster, delivering high availability and disaster recovery.

Windows Server 2025 is optimized for performance and scalability, allowing you to run demanding workloads with confidence. Key enhancements include:

● Support for AMD EPYC Processors: Windows Server 2025 is optimized to take advantage of the performance and scalability benefits of AMD EPYC processors.

● Storage Spaces Direct (S2D): A software-defined storage solution that provides high-performance, highly available storage for your workloads.

● Network Performance: Windows Server 2025 includes a range of network performance enhancements, including improved TCP/IP stack performance and support for 25GbE and 50GbE networking.

Windows Server 2025 brings an enviable array of features set to ease the task of management and administration, which include:

● Windows Admin Center: Web-based management platform that unifies the management experience across your Windows Server environment.

● PowerShell 7: It has more power as a scripting language and offers a range of automation and orchestration capabilities.

● Server Core: The minimal footprint Windows Server, which reduces the attack surface, performance gets improved.

The features of Windows Server 2025, controlled by AI insights and analytics, provide deep dives into your respective IT environments, making it possible to include:

● Windows Server Insights: A real-time monitor and analytics feature, allowing you to quickly identify problems and find attribution.

● Azure Monitor: A monitoring and analytics service based in the cloud providing a unified view of the hybrid cloud environment.

The new Windows Server 2025 release comes with a long list of new capabilities, including key ones:

● Hotpatching enabled by Azure Arc: Customers operating entirely in the cloud have inherent modern security advantages, such as automatic software updates and backup and recovery.

● NVMe storage performance: On identical systems, Windows Server 2025 delivers up to 60% more storage IOPs performance than Windows Server 2022.

● Block cloning support: As Dev Drive uses the ReFS file system format, Block cloning support provides significant performance benefits when copying files.

● New Active Directory (AD) functionalities and capabilities, including AD object repair, optional 32k database page size, and improved security for confidential attributes and default machine account passwords.

● Credential Guard: Starting with Windows Server 2025, it's enabled by default on devices that meet the requirements to block credential theft attacks by protecting NTLM password hashes, Kerberos Ticket Granting Tickets (TGTs), and credentials stored by apps as domain credentials.

● 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 handles it.

● Accelerated Networking (AccelNet): This feature simplifies the management of single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) for virtual machines (VM) hosted on Windows Server 2025 clusters. It uses the high-performance SR-IOV data path to reduce latency, jitter, and CPU utilization.

● DTrace: Windows Server 2025 comes equipped with DTrace as a native tool. DTrace is a command-line utility that enables users to monitor and troubleshoot their system's performance in real-time.

● Virtualization-based security (VBS) enclaves designed to help applications protect their secrets by removing the need to trust admins and hardening against malicious attackers.

● Windows Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS): It automatically generates unique passwords for each computer's local administrator account, stores them securely in AD, and updates them regularly to improve security by reducing the risk of attackers gaining access to sensitive systems using compromised or easily guessable passwords.

When it announced its general availability on Friday, Microsoft revealed that it's investigating several known issues causing various problems on Windows Server 2025 devices.

The following are the minimum hardware requirements needed to ensure that your system can install and run Windows Server 2025 correctly. These requirements apply to all installation options (Server Core and Server with Desktop Environment) and also the Windows Server Standard and Windows Server Datacenter editions.

- 1.4 GHz processor (64 bit)

- Compatible with x64 instruction set

- Support for NX and DEP

- Support for CMPXCHG16b, LAHF/SAHF and PrefetchW

- Support for SLAT (Second-Level Address Translation) such as EPT or NPT

- 512 MB for Server Core

- 2 GB for Server with Desktop Experience

- 32 GB of space for the system partition

- An Ethernet adapter with at least 1 Gbit/s

- Complies with PCI Express architecture

Windows Server 2025 is an operating system providing server capabilities, this makes it extremely powerful and offers an application platform to suit everything from startup-sized businesses to enterprises. Its advanced security capabilities, hybrid cloud capabilities, enhanced speed and scalability, ease of management and maintenance, and AI-driven insights and analytics qualify Windows Server 2025 as the best server software for organizations to utilize when they want to transform IT infrastructure and drive digital transformation.