Microsoft has confirmed the general availability of Windows Server 2025, which, as a long-term servicing channel (LTSC) release, will be supported for almost ten years.
This article describes some of the newest developments in Windows Server 2025, which boasts advanced features that improve security, performance, and flexibility. With faster storage options and the ability to integrate with hybrid cloud environments, managing your infrastructure is now more streamlined. Windows Server 2025 builds on the strong foundation of its predecessor while introducing a range of innovative enhancements to adapt to your needs.
↫ What’s new in Windows Server 2025 article
It should come as no surprise that Windows Server 2025 comes loaded with a ton of new features and improvements. I already covered some of those, such as DTrace by default, NVMe and storage improvements, hotpatching, and more. Other new features we haven’t discussed yet are a massive list of changes and improvements to Active Directory, a feature-on-demand feature for Azure Arc, support for Bluetooth keyboards, mice, and other peripherals, and tons of Hyper-V improvements.
SMB is also seeing so many improvements it’s hard to pick just a few to highlight, and software-defined networking is also touted as a major aspect of Server 2025. With SDN you can separate the network control plane from the data plane, giving administrators more flexibility in managing their network. I can just keep going listing all of the changes, but you get the idea – there’s a lot here.
You can try Windows Server 2025 for free for 180 days, as a VM in Azure, a local virtual machine image, or installed locally through an ISO image.
Does it have the CPU requirements of Windows 11, or can it be used as a Windows 10 substitute that will be supported until 2035?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/hardware-requirements?tabs=cpu&pivots=windows-server-2025
TPM is required only if you intend to use Bitlocker. Other than that, if you have a 10 years old CPU, you meet the requirements.
The suggested price is about 12 benjamins though.
Non-ECC memory would likely be the limiting factor for most.
Having that in a laptop is fairly rare in the consumer space.
Adurbe,
Good eye…
“ECC (Error Correcting Code) type or similar technology for physical host deployments”
You’re right, none of the other min requirements are rare. I wonder if ECC is actually enforced?
Ohh, good catch. It was naive of me to think Microsoft would let me use a half-decent OS.
I still miss my “Win 2008 Workstation”:
There used to be really good guides to take the Windows Server Edition and making it into a really useful workstation (even sometimes playing games if you use “donated” directX libraries from regular Windows). Being a student and actually having access to a free license also helped.
Today the site is down. The new one is not as good, and the community does not seem to be there 🙁
https://www.windowsworkstation.com/
There is also an ARM64 version, although it doesn’t seem to be available officially. You can use uupdump to get it, and it runs fine on a macbook in a vm.