Today, Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Server IoT 2025. This new release includes several improvements, including advanced multilayer security, hybrid cloud agility, AI, performance enhancements, and more.
Microsoft claims that Windows Server IoT 2025 will be able to handle the most demanding workloads, including AI and machine learning. It now has built-in support for GPU partitioning and the ability to process large datasets across distributed environments. With Live Migration and High Availability, it also offers a high-performance platform for both traditional applications and advanced AI workloads.
When it comes to storage IOPS performance, Windows Server IoT 2025 delivers up to 70% more performance compared to Windows Server IoT 2022 on identical hardware. Also, Windows Server IoT 2025 expands storage solutions with Native ReFS deduplication and compression, Thinly Provisioned Storage Spaces, and Storage Replica Compression. These new storage solutions are supported on all editions of Windows Server IoT 2025.
Windows Server IoT 2025 also comes with massive performance and scalability improvements. Windows Server IoT 2025 Hyper-V virtual machines now support 2048 (~8.5x previous) virtual processors and 240 Terabytes (10x previous) of memory.
With major improvements across Hyper-V, GPU integration, Storage Spaces Direct (software-defined storage), software-defined networking, and clustering, Windows Server IoT 2025 delivers great value for customers looking for a server solution that can handle the most demanding workloads.
Microsoft also highlighted that Windows Server IoT 2025 features several security enhancements, including the following:
- Active Directory (AD): The gold standard for identity and authentication only gets better with new security capabilities to help fortify your environment against evolving threats with greater scalability and improvements in protocols, encryption, hardening, and new cryptographic support.
- File Services/Server Message Block (SMB) Hardening: Windows Server IoT 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 takes care of it. With dMSAs, specific permissions can be delegated to access resources in the domain, which reduces security risks and provides better visibility and logs of service account activity.
Last week, Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Server 2025 with build 26100.1742. Microsoft also confirmed that Windows Server 2025 is the latest Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) release for Windows Server. You can learn more about this release here.