5 Intriguing New Features in Windows Server 2025

These features include tight integration with Azure, Active Directory and Hyper-V updates, plus storage improvements.

Windows Server 2025, formerly known as codename Windows Server vNext, is now available in preview.

While Microsoft has not publicly set a date for the final release of its latest server operating system, some IT professionals in discussion forums scattered across the internet already seem hyped about its capabilities after testing the preview.

Those features include tight integration with Azure, Active Directory and Hyper-V updates, plus storage improvements.

Microsoft engineers discussed some of these features in detail at the November 2023 Ignite event. Some of the major and most intriguing new features include:

- Arc-Enabled Hotpatching: Previously, hotpatching was only supported on Windows Server 2022 Datacenter: Azure Edition (Core) VM - allowing server administrators to install updates without having to reboot the server or interrupt any running processes. Hotpatching is now supported on Windows Server 2025 Standard and Datacenter editions, on virtual machines (VMs) and other clouds. The feature does require an Azure Arc subscription.

- Next-Generation Active Directory: Server 2025 supports 32k page-sized Active Directory databases (in comparison, Windows Server 2000 supported an 8k page database). Next-gen AD also offers boosted AD replication. Additionally, Server 2025 has a new functional-level forest and domain. There isn't much documentation on it, but Microsoft said that to leverage the 32k page AD database capability, all domain controllers in a forest, in turn, require a 32k page-capable database - which means migrating DCs to the new functional level.

- Security: There's also some security hardening including Kerberos keys for local user accounts, not just for domain controllers as before. Mailslots - used in Windows Server Active Directory for decades -- is a legacy protocol that allows communication between clients and servers. It is not secure in today's threat environment so it's being dropped from Server 2025 in favor of more modern security protocols.

- Storage performance: Microsoft is boasting 90% more IOPs in storage performance due to new enhancements involving Native Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSDs. Storage replica has also been beefed-up according to Microsoft, with Storage Replica compression now available in all editions of Windows Server, and there some new capabilities with dedupe and Storage Spaces.

- Pumped-Up Hyper-V: Server 2025 Hyper-V VMs now support up to 1,792 virtual processors with 29.7 terabytes of RAM. GPU partitioning (GPU-P) is another new capability that allows sharing a GPU across multiple VMs and supports Live Migration and failover clustering. However, only specific hardware is supported: GPU-P-enabled servers must support SR-IOV, have AMD Milan processors and later, or Intel Sapphire Rapids CPUs and later.