Last November, our most innovative, secure, and performant release to date was made generally available: Windows Server 2025. Incorporating input and feedback from customers, our Windows Server engineering team delivered a release that can enable customers to safeguard their data and infrastructure, handle their most demanding workloads, and help enhance their operational flexibility and connectivity, all with advanced security, cloud agility, and improved performance. As we continue to build and innovate, our team looks forward to engaging and learning from you at every opportunity to help ensure Windows Server continues to enable customers to accelerate innovation in their businesses.

As we reflect on over 30 years of innovation and our most recent release, we are thrilled to invite you to the Windows Server Summit 2025, held on April 29th and 30th on Microsoft Tech Community. This is a premier event for Windows Server professionals eager to stay involved and ahead of the curve. This year’s summit features a lineup of sessions designed to provide deep insight into the latest innovations and best practices in Microsoft Windows Server and Azure.

How to sign up

This event does not require registration, but you should be a member of Microsoft Tech Community to join us live and ask questions via chat during the sessions. We have tons of great content spanning two days, April 29—30th, each day starting at 7 AM PST. Visit this page for details on how to join and add the event to your calendar

Microsoft Tech Community

Meet the experts

You will have the opportunity to meet Windows Server engineering leaders, including Ian LeGrow, CVP PM. Ian leads the Operating Systems Division product management team, responsible for Windows Server and all Windows-based OS at Microsoft. Throughout the event, product managers will share how they have taken your feedback to deliver improved features and one of our most innovative and secure releases of Windows Server yet. They will also provide an exclusive look behind the scenes at what’s coming next in Windows Server, Azure, and hybrid cloud innovations.

Session highlights

After the keynote, you can listen or watch all the way through or pick and choose from mostly 30-minute sessions according to your interests. Here is a small sample of the sessions we have planned:

• Upgrades made easy with Windows Server 2025: Discover why Windows Server 2025 is the easiest version to upgrade ever. Join Rob Hindman and Jeff Woolsey as they delve into media upgrades and feature updates.
• Securing Active Directory: Join Active Directory Program Manager Cliff Fisher for a deep dive into new security features, policies, and defaults for Windows Server 2025. Learn about the new Windows Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS) features, Delegated Managed Service Accounts, and more.
• Windows Server Hyper-V Architecture, features, GPUs, and more! Explore the new GPU partitioning innovation in Windows Server 2025 Hyper-V. This session will cover use cases and hardware considerations.
• Modernize server management and connectivity with Azure Arc: Connect Windows Servers across hybrid, multicloud, and edge environments to Azure. This session will showcase connectivity options and highlight Azure capabilities focused on SCCM modernization.
• What’s next for advanced storage: Discover the major improvements to storage in Windows Server 2025 and get a sneak peek at innovations like Native NVMe (nonvolatile memory express) and rack-aware clustering.
• Fine-tuned host networking for Windows Server 2025: Transform your network setup and management for Windows Server 2025 clusters with Network ATC and Network HUD. Learn how to achieve peak network performance for your workloads with AccelNet.
• SDN magic—Windows Server 2025 innovations: Uncover the power of software-defined networking on Windows Server 2025, including effortless deployments with native SDN (Software-defined networking) and enhanced security posture for your applications.
• Harden security and build resiliency with Windows Server 2025: Stay up-to-date with the latest security features and best practices for securing Windows Server. Learn about Microsoft Defender for Cloud and more.
• Hotpatching and update management for Windows Server with Azure Arc: Learn about the popular new hotpatching feature in Windows Server 2025 and watch demos on managing updates with Azure Arc.
• The Support Case Files—Windows Server troubleshooting tips: Join our Windows Server support engineers as they break down your most requested support cases.
• From on-premises to cloud with Azure File Sync: Learn how to use Azure File Sync to employ hybrid topologies and migrate seamlessly from on-premises to cloud.

Don’t miss out!

Windows Server Summit is a special virtual event with a community-driven, educational focus, and Microsoft engineers as featured speakers. While most of the sessions are advanced and assume good Windows Server experience, you will get something out of this event, whether you are a seasoned IT professional or just starting your journey. We hope you will join us live so you can participate in the Q&A, but if you cannot, sessions will be available on demand a few days after the event. Sign up now and join us for two days of learning together.

Microsoft Windows Server

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Windows Server 2025

Investing in your success with Windows Server

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Advanced multilayered security 

In an era where cybersecurity is of utmost importance (see the Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024 and the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Healthcare Ransomware Report), Windows Server 2025 stands out with a suite of security features designed to safeguard your data and infrastructure. Here are a few key capabilities: 

• 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 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. 

These advanced security features make Windows Server 2025 a robust and secure platform for your IT infrastructure that you should begin evaluating immediately.

Cloud agility anywhere

Windows Server 2025 introduces several advanced hybrid cloud capabilities designed to enhance operational flexibility and connectivity across various environments. Key features include: 

• Hotpatching enabled by Azure Arc: Customers operating fully in the cloud have inherent modern security advantages like automatic software updates and back-up and recovery.  Now we’re bringing some of those capabilities to Windows Server 2025 for on-premises customers with a new hotpatching subscription service, enabled by Azure Arc. With hotpatching, customers will experience fewer reboots and minimal disruption to operations. Hotpatching delivers security updates for Azure Arc-enabled Windows Server 2025 Standard or Datacenter running on physical machines, virtual machines, on-premises, or multicloud servers. Hotpatching, currently in preview, will require a monthly subscription. The hotpatching feature remains no additional cost for Windows Server Datacenter Azure Edition virtual machines.

• Easy Azure Arc onboarding: Windows Server 2025 brings Azure’s powerful capabilities directly into your datacenter through Azure Arc. This integration simplifies the onboarding process to Azure’s hybrid features and enhances operational flexibility, allowing you to manage and secure your hybrid and multicloud environments more effectively. 

• Software-defined network (SDN) multisite features: The software-defined network (SDN) multisite features offer native L2 and L3 connectivity for seamless workload migration across various locations, coupled with unified network policy management. 

• Unified network policy management: This capability allows for centralized management of network policies, making it easier to maintain consistent security and performance standards across your hybrid cloud environment.

These hybrid cloud capabilities make Windows Server 2025 an ideal choice for organizations looking to optimize their IT infrastructure and leverage the benefits of both on-premises and cloud environments.

AI, performance, and scale 

Windows Server 2025 is designed to handle the most demanding workloads, including AI and machine learning. Here are some key capabilities: 

• Hyper-V, AI, and machine learning: With built-in support for GPU partitioning and the ability to process large data sets across distributed environments, Windows Server 2025 offers a high-performance platform for both traditional applications and advanced AI workloads with live migration and high availability. 

• NVMe storage performance: Windows Server 2025 delivers up to 60% more storage IOPs performance compared to Windows Server 2022 on identical systems. (Based on 4K randread using Diskpsd 2.2 with Kioxia CM7 SSd) 

• Storage Spaces Direct and storage flexibility: Windows Server supports a wide range of storage solutions such as local, NAS, and SAN for decades and continues to this day. Windows Server 2025 delivers more storage innovation with Native ReFS deduplication and compression, thinly provisioned Storage Spaces, and Storage Replica Compression now available in all editions of Windows Server 2025.

• Hyper-V performance and scale: Windows Server 2025 introduces massive performance and scalability improvements that come from Azure. Windows Server 2025 Hyper-V virtual machine maximums: 
  • Maximum memory per VM: 240 Terabytes* — (10x previous) 
  • Maximum virtual processors per VM: 2048 VPs* — (~8.5x previous) 

*Requires Generation 2 VMs

Windows Server 2025 delivers major advancements across the board for Hyper-V, GPU integration, Storage Spaces Direct (software defined storage), software-defined networking, and clustering. These improvements make Windows Server 2025 an excellent option for organizations looking for a virtualization solution and for organizations looking to leverage AI and machine learning while maintaining high performance and scalability.

System Center 2025 is available now

By delivering System Center 2025 concurrently with Windows Server 2025, management of Windows Server at scale is available immediately. This allows organizations to make the most of new Windows Server features. Designed to enhance agility, performance, and security, this release is set to enhance how organizations optimize their infrastructure and virtualized software-defined datacenters. We encourage you to visit the System Center 2025 post learn more. 

Microsoft Ignite 2024

We look forward to meeting you in person and sharing these and other Windows Server 2025 features in our sessions and at our booth at Microsoft Ignite in Chicago, November 19-21. For those of you who can’t make it, many sessions, including our Windows Server breakout titled Windows Server 2025: New Ways to gain cloud agility and security, will be available for online viewing. 

We are also excited to bring new features to customers on existing Windows Server versions like 2016, 2019, 2022, as well as 2025. Windows Server Software Assurance or active subscription customers can access Azure management tools like Azure Update Manager, Azure Policy Guest Configuration, Disaster Recovery, Change Tracking and Inventory, and more, with access to many features coming at no additional cost**. Tune into Microsoft Ignite where we will show more demos and information on how to access these new offerings.

Additional Windows Server resources

• Try Windows Server 2025 today
• Windows Server documentation
• Learn more about what’s new in Windows Server 2025
• Microsoft Certified: Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate 
• Administer Active Directory Domain Services

Notes

1. ** Note: compute and storage may incur additional fees. 

The post Windows Server 2025 now generally available, with advanced security, improved performance, and cloud agility  appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

Windows Server 2025

Download the public preview to try these exciting new features.

Start here

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
• Easy upgrades through Windows Update.

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.

Windows Server customers on the leading edge

While Windows Server 2025 is only coming into its public preview now, we’d like to share just a few inspiring customer stories you might have missed, to help you plot the journey ahead:

• CTT – Correios de Portugal: Learn how an organization that’s been around since 1520 gets ready for AI.

• Hokkoku Bank: This bank laid the initial groundwork for modernization by moving its entire on-premises estate to Windows Server. This created a seamless path to full cloud transformation on Microsoft Azure.

• DICK’s Sporting Goods: This Windows Server customer created an omnichannel athlete experience using Azure Arc and Azure Kubernetes Service.

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 input from dedicated professionals like you. Thank you for being a valuable Windows Server customer and, through your passion and feedback, helping us shape this new release. For more details, read this Windows Server documentation, watch our Windows Server Summit sessions, or check out the “What’s ahead for Windows 2025” video.

Download the Windows Server 2025 preview.

¹This information relates to a prerelease product that may be substantially modified before it’s released. Microsoft makes no warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to the information provided here.

²Based on a 2023 Microsoft survey of Windows Server customers using hybrid cloud in their organization. N=197.

³Up to 70% more IOPs on NVMe SSDs; Windows Server 2025 Hyper-V Virtual Machine Maximums: Maximum Memory per VM: 240 Terabytes* (10x previous) ; Maximum Virtual Processors per VM: 2048 VPs* (~8.5x previous) *Requires Generation 2 VMs ; Windows Server 2025 Host Memory Maximums: 4 Petabytes for hosts that support 5 level paging (166x previous) ; 256 Terabytes for hosts that support 4 level paging (10x previous) 

The post Gain enhanced security and performance with Windows Server 2025—now in preview appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

However, as many organizations like yours are eager to innovate with AI for various use cases, it is also very important, if not more, to have a solid IT foundation that can support that ambitious AI vision—from a cost, performance, and security perspective. The last thing companies want is to make a big investment in AI and machine learning initiatives too soon, without the bandwidth, guardrails, or necessary performance in place to support it.

At the heart of your IT estate lies strategic investments you have in business-critical workloads like Windows Server and SQL Server that are and have been the foundation of many organizations for more than 30 years now. The question then becomes—how do you modernize these foundational technologies to make you ready to leverage the full power of AI, that will allow you to adopt AI in a secure, responsible way and gain an edge over the competition?

Catch up on sessions from Microsoft Ignite

Whether you missed some of the sessions at Ignite or just want a recap of all things Windows Server and SQL Server, we’ve got you covered. In this blog, we’re going to showcase the main Ignite sessions for Windows Server and SQL Server, where we had various announcements, demos, and customer testimonials.

Windows Server

What’s New in Windows Server v.Next: In this session, we provide a preview of what’s coming next for Windows Server, a platform that enables IT professionals and developers to modernize their applications and enable hybrid use cases. The topics covered were Active Directory, File Server, Storage, Hyper-V, Security, and more.

Do more with Windows Server and SQL Server on Azure: This session highlights how you can reap more technical and business benefits by running Windows Server and SQL Server on Microsoft Azure. You’ll learn how Azure provides optimal cost benefits, performance, and security for these workloads. Get tips and demos on how to extend Azure innovations to your hybrid and multi-cloud environments with Azure Arc.

Migrate to Innovate: Be AI-ready, secure, and optimize operations: This is an immersive session for IT practitioners on how to migrate to Azure. We highlighted practical steps, demos, and guidance on how migrating to Azure can accelerate the impact of AI in your organization. We then highlighted how you can enhance security and optimize operations once in the cloud and take the first step into Azure with Azure Migrate.

Learn Live: Upgrade and migrate Windows Server IaaS virtual machines: In this online session, you can learn to migrate a workload running in Windows Server to an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) virtual machine and to Windows Server 2022 by using Windows Server migration tools or the Storage Migration Service.

SQL Server

Get superior price and performance with Azure cloud-scale databases: In this session, you can learn how to improve performance with the latest capabilities for Azure SQL Databases, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, and SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc for hybrid and multi-cloud. You’ll learn how customers enabled ongoing innovation by migrating to Azure Database for MySQL. This session will cover tactical ways to get the most from your applications with the databases that are easy to use, deliver unmatched price and performance, support open-source, and enable transformative AI technologies.

Accelerate your SQL migration with Azure Data Migration Service: In this demo, you’ll see how the new Azure Data Migration Service along with Azure Migrate can accelerate your SQL modernization journey. We will showcase Azure Data Migration Service streamlined capabilities for readiness assessment, SKU recommendations based on workload rightsizing, and online and offline data migration across Portal, Azure Data Studio, PowerShell, and command-line interface (CLI) experiences that you need for your SQL Server migration journey to Azure from on-premises.

Migrate to innovate: Modernize your data on Azure SQL Managed Instance: In this session, you can watch new performance enhancements in action and experience the ease of online migration to Azure SQL Managed Instance using the link feature. See how you can continue to modernize on Azure through Microsoft Fabric integration and connections to other Azure services.

Bring enhanced manageability to SQL Server anywhere with Azure Arc: Join this discussion to discover how connecting your SQL Servers to Azure can enhance your management, security, and governance capabilities with live demos. SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc is a hybrid cloud solution that allows you to manage, secure, and govern your SQL Server estate running anywhere from Azure. Our experts will also explore different options for deploying Azure Arc to your SQL Servers at scale.

Next steps to modernize Windows Server and SQL Server

Ready to take the next step in modernizing your Windows Server and SQL Server? Here are some quick resources to get started:

1. Upgrade to the latest versions of Windows Server to take advantage of the latest capabilities. Learn more about Windows Server 2022 and SQL Server 2022.
2. Looking to migrate to Azure? Take the first step with Azure Migrate and Modernize, our offering that has programs, offers, support, free tooling, and expert guidance to confidently migrate to Azure.
3. Join the discussion on our Windows Server Tech Community and SQL Server Tech Community.

¹ ITProToday, Microsoft Ignite 2023 Envisions AI as an Everyday Reality, November 16, 2023.

The post Windows Server and SQL Server at Microsoft Ignite 2023 appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

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Are you still using traditional Windows Server Backup (WSB) to back up your servers to locally attached media or network shares? It’s time to take a hard look at the cloud for your backup needs. Advances in  security and performance make Azure Backup a great option. With the general availability of System State backup to cloud, you can now backup key workloads like Active Directory, IIS Web Servers, and File Servers to cloud without needing a local copy on-premises.

Traditional Windows Server Backup (WSB) is a tool that server admins used for more than a decade for backup and recovery of Windows Server environments. You can protect files, system state, or bare metal either to locally attached media or to network shares to store the backups at remote locations.  The choice between local and remote backup is driven by a combination of Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and compliance requirements (offsite backups for disaster recovery purposes). Workloads with low RTO requirements had to be stored locally but that is changing with the advent of public cloud. With advances in network bandwidth and storage technologies, restoring individual files and System state from cloud backups is getting faster every day which satisfies RTO requirements of this scenario for most enterprises and therefore the top workload for remote backups. You can now modernize your backups through Azure Backup, which  allows you to lower the consumption of local storage for backups and reserve most of it for production workloads.

Why Azure Backup?

Secure & reliable offsite backup to Azure

Azure Backup leverages the infinite scale of Azure to provide you a bottomless, highly available and robust offsite target. Azure Backup stores 3 copies of your data at a minimum, thereby precluding possibilities of backup data loss due to corruption or storage failures. Azure Backup encrypts your backups right at the source with a key that only you have access to and has built-in security features that safe guard against ransomware attacks. These security features are built on the following principles and ensure that customers can secure their backups and recover data even if production servers are compromised:

1. Prevention: Critical operations like Backup data deletion or passphrase change require a security pin available to users with valid Azure credentials.
2. Alerting: Email notifications are sent to backup admins for any critical operations that impact availability of backup data. These notifications enable users to detect attacks as soon as they occur.
3. Recovery: Azure Backup retains deleted backup data for 14 days ensuring recovery in case of inadvertent or malicious deletes.

Flexible backup policy

Azure Backup allows up to 3 daily backups that provide higher granularity during recovery as well as separate backup policies for Files and System State that provide flexibility for the server’s data and configuration. You can specify retention period for daily, monthly, weekly, and yearly backups to meet Long term-retention (LTR) needs for your data sources while optimizing storage consumption in Azure.

Single management pane for all the servers

Traditional Windows Server Backup allowed you to manage one server at a time, but with Azure Backup, you can manage Windows Server backups at scale. Once these servers are registered with the Azure Backup service, you get a bird’s eye view of the status of all the backups and get  automated alerts for failed backups. You can check the compliance on Backup SLAs through custom Power BI reports even on your mobile phone. Furthermore, you don’t need to deploy any agents or provision additional infrastructure to get these management capabilities.

Get started

• Create your 30-day free trial Azure account which has $200 of Azure credits to get you started.
• Use existing Windows Server licenses to get great discount for running Windows Server in Azure virtual machines.
• Follow 3 simple steps in this tutorial to start backing up your files and System State.
• Manage backups from servers at scale with central monitoring and reporting.

Get started today and reach out to us on Twitter @MSHybridCloud or the Azure Backup user voice to share your experiences.

The post Modernize Windows Server backups with Azure Backup appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

As you are probably aware, Hyper-V was launched way back in Windows Server 2008. It’s been almost a decade of evolution based on customer feedback and most recently our learnings in running Azure. The entire operating system changed because of the hypervisor and many other features were added to support the new norm – applications run on virtual machines today. However, there’s one bit of feedback that we haven’t delivered on… yet.

In a clustered virtual environment, the storage is shared between the multiple nodes, usually in a SAN device, which makes the local drives for the virtualization host almost unnecessary. You still need a local drive for the host operating system itself. For some customers, not having a local drive would be ideal, but they still need a drive to boot and the feedback was that SD cards could be used for that purpose. However, Windows Server has some requirements that SD cards are not able to meet around endurance, performance, and capacity.

Today we are excited to announce the support for SATA-connected Disk-on-Modules (SATADOM) devices as primary boot drives for Windows Server 2016 and future Long-Term Servicing Branch (LTSC) or Semi-Annual Channel releases.

“SATADOM modules show that they can operate in a high I/O environment like Windows Server and they can offer significant savings in the cost of the boot drives, density and power,” says Erin Chapple, General Manager, Windows Server. “Each server node that uses a SATADOM for the boot drive uses less power and enables higher storage density, which lowers the cost of the solution.”

Flash devices that are connected over a high-speed interface, such as SATA or PCI-e, have been supported by Windows Server for many years. In our testing, we have found that not all flash storage devices are created equal. There are three main factors needed to insure proper boot support:

• Endurance: Based on data we collected running VM Fleet workloads, we require a minimum endurance of 0.14 drive writes per day for Server boot devices. This is one order of magnitude above what our endurance data is showing.
• Performance: To ensure that a boot device can handle the necessary IO load, we are requiring that the system run the Private Cloud Simulator (PCS) test for a minimum of five days without the boot drive causing failures. Flash devices not adhering to these designs can cause large latency spikes that can take down a cluster node or cause Windows processes to slow considerably.
• Capacity: To ensure enough room for the OS, its updates, the cluster database, and logging over the five-year lifetime of the server we are recommending a minimum capacity of 128GB. As flash storage degrades, it will rewrite memory pages and mark bad cells as unusable. This causes the drive capacity to steadily trend lower over the life of the device. Overprovisioning is required to withstand the workload over time.

Approved SATADOM devices will be identified by the OEM that sells and supports the solution. Many flash storage devices that have been certified can be found on the Windows Server Catalog, however, they will need to go through additional testing and validation by the server manufacturer. OEMs should validate the quality of their SATADOM modules by running the HLK device.storage tests and must perform a full run of the Private Cloud Simulator (PCS) test in a clustered configuration for a minimum of 5 days without the boot drive causing failures.

While a SATADOM device which meets the requirements outlined in this article has sufficient endurance and over-provisoning capacity to handle typical page file and cluster database usage, if a customer has workloads which are anticipated to result in heavy swapping, or has not configured the server with sufficient system DRAM, it is recommended that the system page file is re-routed to an alternative location. Alternatively, if the system is configured with ample system DRAM, the customer can choose to completely disable the system page file. Further, the DOM module must be connected to an internal SATA port and be tagged as “non-removable”. At some point, we will likely adopt additional specifications, including support for high-write endurance devices such as 3D XPoint.

It’s also important to note that SATADOM devices should be used for the OS Boot. In that case, data drives are either Storage Spaces Direct or traditional SAN or NAS. We continue to evaluate Secure Digital (SD) cards and USB-connected flash drives and hope to include support for these types of drives in the future.

If you haven’t already, join our Windows Insiders program so you can access the new preview build for Windows Server Semi-Annual Channel releases and join the conversation in the Tech Community.

The post Announcing support for SATADOM boot drives in Windows Server 2016 appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

Greetings!

We’re watching the calendar and counting down to Microsoft Ignite September 25-29 in Orlando, Florida. Ignite is a great way to see the latest and greatest products and technologies with hundreds of hours of content, meet with your peers and partners, and get firsthand experience with hands-on labs. If you’re already registered for Ignite, be sure to check the event catalog and start selecting your sessions. If you haven’t grabbed a ticket yet, there are limited passes remaining, so get one while you still can!

As we countdown to Ignite, we want to begin a blog series that provides a sneak peek of the next release of Windows Server: Windows Server, version 1709. We’ll be launching Windows Server, version 1709 at Ignite, which builds on the innovation in Windows Server 2016, so let’s begin with a brief recap of some of the areas we focused on in Windows Server 2016.

Application innovation

One area of great interest to customers around the world is application modernization. While a large percentage of applications have moved from physical machines to virtual machines, you’ve told us that you want more. You’ve told us:

1. You have existing business critical applications that you would like to modernize by moving to a modern platform with better security and better resource usage with minimal/no development effort. Think of this as “lift and shift.”
2. You are building new applications and you want to build these apps with the cloud as a design point and with the flexibility to run on-premises, in the cloud, or as a hybrid service that takes advantage of the best of both worlds.

In Windows Server 2016, we delivered on both these areas in a major way and we’re just getting started with our investments in Cloud App Platform to:

1. Provide a way for IT Pros to lift and shift traditional apps to Docker containers with Server Core.
2. Enable cloud developers to write new cloud apps with Nano Server, .NET Core and Docker.

From a platform standpoint, Windows Server 2016 is the first version of Windows Server to include container technology. Windows Server containers provide application isolation through process and namespace isolation. You can realize the benefits of using containers for applications—with little or no code changes with Windows Server Core. We then added Hyper-V isolation to Windows Server Containers to expand on the isolation by running each container in a highly-optimized virtual machine making it ideal for running in a hostile multitenant environment. Containers, Nano Server, Azure Container Service, and Windows Server provide a rich set of cloud enabling building blocks for true business agility in building always-on, scalable, and distributed applications to run in Azure, on-premises, or hybrid.

Security

Windows Server 2016 is designed with security in mind throughout development as part of our SDL, and reduces risk with multiple layers of security deeply integrated in the operating system for on-premises and cloud protection such as Secure Boot, Code Integrity, Virtualization Based Security, Control Flow Guard, Windows Defender, Just in Time Administration, Just Enough Administration, and much more…

One of the most innovative solutions delivered in Windows Server 2016 was the coupling of security and our hypervisor, Hyper-V, to create Shielded VMs. Shielded VMs are a groundbreaking new technology that makes a virtual machine running Windows a “black box” to protect against a rogue administrator or a virtual machine getting into the wild. Nothing in the industry compares to Shielded VMs.

Software Defined Datacenter that’s ready for the cloud

Windows Server provides the same Hyper-V hypervisor that we run in Azure, so you get the benefits of Azure’s requirements too. A great example of an Azure requirement being delivered to you is industry-leading scale. Windows Server 2016 supports the largest physical servers (24 TB RAM, 512 logical processors) and the largest virtual machines (12 TB RAM, 240 virtual processors). Those massive scalability requirements were driven by Azure, and we are happy to share the same technology with you in Windows Server.

In terms of Software-defined Networking, we took our learnings from Azure and brought them to Windows Server with technologies such as the Azure Data plane, software load balancer, distributed firewall and more. With Windows Server 2016 we delivered Azure inspired, Software-defined Networking to be used on-premises, and these same technologies are also used by Microsoft Azure Stack.

In terms of storage, we took the best performing Software-defined Storage stack and enabled new flexible hyper-converged deployment capabilities to build highly available, scalable software-defined storage solutions at a fraction of the cost of a storage area network (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS). The Storage Spaces Direct feature lets you use industry-standard servers with local storage. We then added Storage Replica which provides both synchronous and asynchronous options to meet your business requirements.

Long-Term Servicing Channel and Semi-Annual Channel Releases

As we prepare for the Windows Server, version 1709 release, we also want to make sure that folks clearly understand the new release models, including the Long-Term Servicing Channel and the Semi-annual Channel.

Before we discuss these two release models, let’s provide some context. Going all the way back to Windows Server 2003, Microsoft regularly delivered Windows Server releases every two to three years. Over the years, we heard feedback that Microsoft was “too slow.” Customers wanted us to go faster. Customers told us that they felt that being on the leading edge of a technology gave them a competitive advantage. So, we changed. Following the release of Windows Server 2012, we released Windows Server 2012 R2 less than a year later. The feedback we then received, and from some quite loudly, was “Microsoft you’re going too fast. Slow down.”

The pushback on a faster release was an interesting data point. It indicated we had two tracks of customers. One who wanted slow consistency and another who wanted continuous innovation. So, we tried another approach to better test this hypothesis.

In Windows Server 2016 development, we began by releasing frequent Technology Previews (TP). We released a total of five technology previews throughout development. Each TP included additional features, and we partnered with users to help us make changes through development. There were many organizations who were so pleased with a particular TP release that they asked us if we would support them in production.

The Windows Server 2016 development cycle only reinforced the notion that we needed two tracks, which is what we are now delivering with the Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) and the Semi-Annual Channel. So moving forward, Windows Server is evolving to deliver innovation through two channels: The Long-Term Servicing Channel and the Semi-Annual Channel.

• Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) – this is business as usual with 5 years of mainstream support and 5 years of extended support. You’ll have the option to upgrade to the next LTSC release every 2-3 years the same way folks have for the last 20 years.
• For those of you who want to innovate faster and take advantage of new features sooner, we are adding the Semi-annual Channel. The Semi-Annual Channel is a Software Assurance benefit and is fully supported in production. The difference is that it is supported for 18 months and there will be a new version every six months.

Keep in mind that both the Long-Term Servicing Channel and the Semi-Annual Channel are both fully supported in production, and that you can mix and match. For example:

• If you have a legacy application that you rarely touch running in a VM, then maybe the LTSC release makes sense.
• If you have a new, cloud application that your dev team is building using containers and they want the latest and greatest container features in Nano Server/Server Core, then likely the Semi-Annual Channel is the right choice.

The point is, we’re providing both options, and you get to choose which makes the most sense for you. Finally, whether you choose LTSC or Semi-annual Channel, you are in full control of patching your servers. To make the Windows Server versions easy to identify, we are taking a cue from the Windows team and refer to this release by the year and the month. In this case, 1709 refers to the year 2017, and the ninth month, September. Very straightforward. The way that we are delivering Windows Server moving forward offers more opportunity than ever to influence product direction, so please sign up to the Windows Server Insider Program if you haven’t already!

In the next few blogs, we’re going to introduce areas of investments for the Windows Server, version 1709 for developers, security, Software-defined datacenter and management.

The post Sneak peek #1: Windows Server, version 1709 appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

On Thursday, August 24, 2017 from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM Pacific, we will host a one-hour AMA (Ask Microsoft Anything) session to answer your questions about the storage features of Windows Server. In this free session, you’ll be able to ask Microsoft experts your questions about the storage capabilities of Windows Server 2016. We have reserved an extra-large conference room and we’re bringing donuts, so we don’t run out of space or engineers to answer your questions.

Our goal for this AMA is to help you understand how to:

• Protect data in more scenarios
• Create cost-effective, scalable storage
• Prioritize storage resources for critical apps
• Reduce capacity needs and infrastructure

The post Questions about Windows Server storage? Ask the people who built it. appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

Partners offer three kinds of WSSD solutions:

• Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) Standard: Highly virtualized compute and storage are combined in the same server-node cluster, making them easier to deploy, manage, and scale.
• Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) Premium: Comprehensive “software-defined datacenter in a box” adds software-defined networking and security features to HCI Standard.
• Software-Defined Storage (SDS): Built on server-node clusters, this enterprise-grade, shared-storage solution replaces traditional external storage device at a much lower cost while support for all-flash NVMe drives delivers unrivaled performance.

Learn more by reading the Hybrid Cloud blog post Datacenter efficiency gets easier with new Windows Server Software Defined partner solutions.

The post New validated Windows Server Software Defined solutions from our partners appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.