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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The post Join us at Windows Server Summit 2025 and learn more about our latest innovations! appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

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.

With Windows Server 2016, Microsoft has significantly bumped up the Hyper-V Virtual Machine (VM) scale limit to embrace new scenarios such as running e-commerce large in-memory databases for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Data Warehousing (DW) purposes. In this post, we highlight the performance of in-memory transaction processing at scale using SQL Server 2016 running in a Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V VM.

The result: 343,000 transactions per second using an order processing workload with a 4 terabyte in-memory database, running in a VM with 5.5 terabytes of memory and 128 virtual processors. The performance in the VM was >95% of the performance on a physical server.

Below, we first present our findings, comparing the performance of a physical host versus a Hyper-V large-scale VM. We then recap the increased scalability for VMs with Hyper-V in Windows Server 2016, in-memory transaction processing support in SQL Server 2016, and the benchmark workload we used to obtain these performance numbers. Finally, we detail the hardware and software setup used in the experiment.

SQL Server In-Memory OLTP Performance Comparison

We used BenchCraft, an internal Microsoft tool, to run an OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) workload against the in-memory database. The in-memory database size is approximately 4TB with durable, fully logged tables – some of those tables have over 5 billion rows. We achieved over 340K OLTP Transactions per Second (TPS) when running the OLTP workload in a single large-scale Hyper-V VM. Compared with 358K TPS performance with the physical host, Hyper-V VM delivers ~95% of what a physical host can do.

Table 1. In-Memory Processing Performance Numbers Comparison

Hyper-V Large-Scale VM Support in Windows Server 2016

Windows Server 2016 increases the scalability for Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs), with support for up to 240 virtual processors and 12 terabytes of memory. Below is the comparison between Windows Server 2012/2012 R2 and Windows Server 2016 for Hyper-V scalability on a per VM basis:

Table 2. Hyper-V Scalability Limit Comparison

Note: to use the new Hyper-V large scale VMs, the follow conditions must be met:

1. Both host and VM guest OS must be Windows Server 2016 or newer.
2. VM type must be generation 2 and VM version must be 8.0 or newer.

SQL Server 2016 In-Memory OLTP

In-Memory OLTP is the premier performance technology of SQL Server which significantly increases performance of transactional workloads, compared with traditional (disk-based) database technology. It was first released as part of SQL Server 2014, with further usability and performance improvements in SQL Server 2016 and in Azure SQL Database.

With the memory-optimized tables and natively compiled stored procedures introduced by In-Memory OLTP, customers achieve up to 30x (30-fold) performance improvement compared with traditional tables and stored procedures. Data storage and data access in memory-optimized tables is optimized around the data being memory-resident, and the Transact-SQL logic in natively compiled stored procedures is compiled to machine code. These efficiencies result in very low latency of user transactions, which results in short response times and allows a single CPU core to execute that many more transactions per second. In addition, transaction processing for memory-optimized tables is completely latch- and lock-free – even spinlocks are avoided completely. This allows all concurrent transactions in the system to execute without interference, resulting in linear scaling of transaction throughput with the number of CPU cores in the server.

For more details about In-Memory OLTP see In-Memory OLTP (In-Memory Optimization).

Order Processing Workload

The benchmark for the performance experiments represents an example order processing and fulfillment workload. It is described on the SQL Server Samples GitHub repository: Order Processing Benchmark using In-Memory OLTP. Both experiments use a 4 terabyte version of the database as a starting point of the run. Below is the transaction breakdown in details for the workload being used.

Table 3. OLTP In-Memory Workload Characteristics

We used the same client setup for both experiments. We used 26 workload drivers, with 800 threads per driver, for a total of 20,800 client connections. SQL server and clients are running on separate but two identical machines using dedicated network (100GbE x 4) to connect them together.

Setup

To compare the performance of the benchmark between physical and virtual machines, we used the same physical hardware. For the first experiment, we ran the workload with SQL Server 2016 running on the physical machine. For the second experiment we created a Hyper-V VM on the same physical machine, and ran the workload with SQL Server running in the VM.

Find below the configuration for the physical machines used in the experiments, as well as the Hyper-V virtual machine (VM). One physical machine was used for all the workload drivers, while the other machine was used to run SQL Server in the first experiment, and was used as Hyper-V host in the second experiment. Four dedicated 100GbE network links are used to connect the two physical machines, for both experiments.

Physical Machine Configuration:

• Operating System: Windows Server 2016 Datacenter
• Physical Machine Settings: We used two HPE ProLiant DL580 Gen9 servers which are four socket enterprise x86 units offering compelling performance and virtualization efficiencies. Each system was configured with 6TB RAM (64GB LRDIMM x 96), 144 logical processors (4 Intel Xeon E7-8890 v3 2.50GHZ 18-core CPUs with Hyper-Threading enabled) and 9 PCIe Gen3 cards (5 for storage and 4 for network).
  • Notes: 1. Maximum(High) performance is used as the Power Profile in both machine BIOS and OS settings; 2. SR-IOV support is enabled in machine BIOS as well.
• Physical Machine Storage Settings: Each HPE ProLiant DL580 Gen9 server is configured with five PCIe Gen3 x8 6.4TB HHHL NVMe cards. Each of these NVMe can deliver up to 6000MB/s for sequential reads and up to 2000MB/s for sequential writes.
  • Note: OS system drive is sitting on a RAID managed by a separate 12G SAS RAID controller.
• Physical Machine Network Settings: Each HPE ProLiant Gen9 server is configured with four InfiniBand EDR/Ethernet 100Gb 1-port network adapters which are based on Mellanox ConnectX-4 technology for scalability and fabric flexibility.
  • Notes: 1. SR-IOV support is enabled; 2. Jumbo packet size support is increased from default 1514 to 9014 to better support the workloads driven by the BenchCraft;

Hyper-V VM Configuration:

• Operating System: Windows Server 2016 Datacenter.
• Virtual Machine Settings:
  • Type and version: generation 2 and version 8.0
  • Virtual Machine Memory: 5.5TB RAM
  • Number of virtual processors(VP): 128. Note: we assigned 128 out of 144 CPUs to the VM so we can reserve some CPU cycles for the host to avoid possible contention due to overlapping between the host root VP and VM VP under CPU intensive workloads. To help better scale, vNUMA(4 nodes) is also enabled to align with the underlying physical NUMA settings.
  • Number of virtual SCSI controllers: 4
    • Note: for best performance reasons, we used separate virtual SCSI controllers for VM OS drive(x1), SQL Server In-Memory OLTP checkpoint files(x2) and transactional log files(x1).
• Virtual Machine Storage Settings: For performance reasons, we attached five NVMe SSDs to the VM directly as passthru disks which allows us to minimize overhead associated with the file based virtualized storage path as well as file system overhead incurred on the host.
  • Note: 1. To achieve maximum parallelism purpose, four passthru disks within VM are dedicated to host SQL Server In-Memory OLTP checkpoint files (16 in total and 4 per SSD); 2. SQL Server transactional log files are sitting on the 5th passthru disk to avoid resource contention with checkpoint file I/Os.
• Virtual Machine Network Settings: For performance reasons, four 100GbE network adapters were attached to the VM directly via SR-IOV to further drive down the network latency.
  • Note: 1. RSS (Receive Side Scaling) is enabled and number of receive queues is set to 16; 2. Network adapter profile is set to NUMA Static.

Conclusion

The new scale limits for Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V allow large scale VMs to host all sizes of in-memory database management systems on the Cloud and provide great performance for in-memory transaction processing using SQL Server 2016.

To get more information on the benefits of running SQL Server 2016 on Windows Server 2016:

• Read our new blog series Five Reasons to run SQL Server 2016 on Windows Server 2016.

The post Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V large-scale VM performance for in-memory transaction processing appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

We are about a month away from Microsoft Ignite 2016 in Atlanta and we are eager to see you and provide a first-class tour of Windows Server, System Center, OMS, Azure, along with so much more. For those of you who have been evaluating the Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview releases, a huge thank you. Your feedback has directly contributed to feature additions and refinements along the way to make sure we’re building the best server for you, whether it’s on-premises or in the cloud.

To start, let’s begin with an area we haven’t disclosed yet: scale. When it comes to development, there are a number of areas that are never “done.” These are areas where we’re always moving the bar to improve with hardware and to advance the state of the art. Security and performance are a couple of examples along with scale.

Back in Windows Server 2012, we raised the bar for Hyper-V, delivering industry-leading scalability across a number of scenarios. These numbers were so high, that when we delivered Windows Server 2012 R2 a year later, we didn’t even bother to push the scale numbers further because we had no requests!

Not this time. With Windows Server 2016, we had numerous requests to push Hyper-V scalability to new heights to embrace interesting new scenarios around data analytics and machine learning, which means really huge databases.

Now, you have it. With Windows Server 2016, we are delivering new industry-leading scalability to virtualize any and every workload without exception.

For those of you who haven’t been able to keep up with all of the new scenarios and features we’re introducing, no worries! It just means we need to bring you up to speed, and now seems like a good time to do that. So, based on the feedback we’ve been hearing throughout the Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview, here are just a few of the top scenarios and features we’ve been asked about in Windows Server 2016. First off, it starts with security. As more and more customers talk to us about their hybrid cloud journey, every conversation has a security component. Folks want to know how the security landscape is changing and what additional layers of protection we are putting in place to help.

Shielded virtual machines

Virtualization security is a major investment area in Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V. In addition to protecting hosts or other virtual machines from a virtual machine running malicious software, we also need to protect virtual machines from a compromised host. Since a virtual machine is just a file, we need to protect it from attacks via the storage system, the network, or while it is backed up. This is a fundamental need for every virtualization platform today, whether it’s Hyper-V, VMware, or any other. Quite simply, if a virtual machine gets out of an organization (either maliciously or accidentally) that virtual machine can be run on any other system. Protecting high value assets in your organization such as domain controllers, sensitive file servers, and HR systems is a top priority, which is why we’ve made this scenario a top priority in Windows Server 2016. Quite simply, nothing like it exists in the market.

To learn more about this key capability, check out this article on Guarded Fabric and Shielded VMs.

Shielded VMs is just one of many new security features in a long list in Windows Server 2016. Next, there’s storage.

Scale Out File Server with Storage Spaces Direct (RDMA) for Hyper-converged infrastructure

Windows Server 2016 Datacenter introduces Storage Spaces Direct, which enables building highly available (HA) storage systems with local storage. This is a significant step forward in Microsoft Windows Server software-defined storage (SDS), as it simplifies the deployment and management of SDS systems and also unlocks the use of new classes of disk devices, such as SATA and NVMe disk devices, that were previously not possible with clustered Storage Spaces with shared disks. Windows Server 2016 provides a hyper-converged solution by allowing the same set of servers to provide SDS through Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), and also by serving as the hosts for virtual machines using Hyper-V.

For more information on this area, please reference Storage Spaces Direct in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview.

Flexible software-defined storage is another great tool for IT Pros. Now, let’s take a look at some enterprise-grade, developer-focused features with Windows Containers.

Containers

Windows Containers provide operating system-level virtualization that allows multiple isolated applications to be run on a single system. Two different types of container runtime are included with the feature, each with a different degree of application isolation. Windows Server Containers achieve isolation through namespace and process isolation while Hyper-V Containers encapsulate each container in a lightweight virtual machine. Curious to learn more? Be sure to reference this documentation piece on Windows Containers.

Like I said at the beginning, these are just a few of the scenarios and feature areas that are resonating so far in Windows Server 2016. We’ve got a lot more in store — we’ll see you at Ignite!

The post Windows Server scalability and more! appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

With Windows Server 2016 there are three core areas we are focusing on in the world of cloud and virtualization:

• Providing a platform for next-gen cloud applications
• Ensuring you can protect your datacenter assets from emerging threats
• Continuing to deliver a cloud platform that is perfect for your mission critical workloads

Let’s dig into each of these areas for a moment

Providing a platform for next-gen cloud applications

Virtualization has been amazing technology for the datacenter, enabling efficiencies and cost savings through increased density and decoupling workloads from physical server hardware.   However, we believe that we have only just started on the journey of unlocking the capabilities of cloud computing.  Once you start running applications that were “designed for the cloud” on a fabric that was “designed for the cloud” you start to enable entirely new levels of efficiency and functionality.

Two big investments that we have made in this area are:

Hyper-V on Nano Server

Running Hyper-V on Nano Server, a highly focused and small footprint version of Windows Server, brings many benefits to your cloud environment.  Physical servers are quicker and easier to deploy, they need less patching and carry less configuration state.  This makes it incredibly easy to build true scalable cloud deployments.

Windows Server Containers

Containers are an exciting new technology for building, testing and deploying applications.  Applications are fueling the innovation in today’s cloud-mobile world, and developers hold the keys to the power of those applications. The more streamlined and efficient the process for developers to build and deliver their applications, the faster that more powerful applications can reach the business. This however, has to work across both the developers, and IT who hold the keys when it comes to the infrastructure that the applications will run on.

For the developers, containers unlock huge gains in productivity, and freedom – the ability to build an application, package within a container, and deploy, knowing that wherever you deploy that container, it will run without modification, whether that is on-premises, in a service provider’s datacenter, or in the public cloud, using services such as Microsoft Azure.  These containers don’t have to be deployed independently – developers can model complex multi-tier applications, with each tier packaged within a container, and these can be distributed across IaaS and PaaS models, again, increasing the overall surface area that the developer can aim for when releasing their application. This powerful abstraction of microservices provides developers with incredible potential to deliver applications more rapidly than ever before.  They can’t however, do it without the Operations’ team support.

On the Operations side, they benefit considerably by being able to gain ever higher levels of consolidation for applications and workloads than even virtualization could provide, and in addition, they can put in place a platform that can rapidly scale up and down to meet the changing needs of the business. This standardized platform is easier to manage, yet provides the developers with a consistent environment into which they can simple provide their app, and hit ‘run’.

Ensuring you can protect your datacenter assets from emerging threats

When it comes to datacenter security, one of the key design pillars of Hyper-v is to make virtual machine security on par with the physical machine security. If a physical machine is completely locked down and a hacker cannot gain access through a vulnerability, short of walking in to the datacenter and removing that physical server, it’s safe to assume that particular physical server is secure.

However, any seized or infected host that has been compromised by an attack, now puts the virtual machines at significant risk, as VMs can be copied from storage, over the network.

The flexibility of virtualization also poses a challenge in itself. For instance, without any form of hardware-based verification, which is rare in today’s x86 physical server space, there’s no way to identify legitimate hosts, which have or haven’t been compromised. This means a VM can, in essence, run anywhere.

So what is Microsoft’s approach to protecting virtual machines?

First, by utilizing the power of hardware-rooted technologies, we enable a new Virtual Secure Mode. This protects access to the processes and memory of the virtual machine, from the host itself, completely separating the guest OS, from host administrators. Host administrators cannot access guest VM secrets and can’t run arbitrary kernel mode code.

By implementing a new Windows Server role, the Host Guardian Service, it enables administrators to identify legitimate hosts, and certifies them to run protected virtual machines, known as Shielded VMs.

Finally, by integrating with the underlying hardware, we enable a new virtualized trusted platform module, or vTPM, that, when exposed inside the virtual machine, enables the guest operating system to take advantage of native encryption features such as BitLocker, protecting the valuable information within that shielded virtual machine. Features such as Live Migration still continue to work, and, the traffic is also encrypted, ensuring that even when moving virtual workloads around the environment, the data remains secure and encrypted.

Continuing to deliver a cloud platform that is perfect for your mission critical workloads

Third, and in many ways, most importantly we have been investing in continuing to improve the capabilities of Hyper-V as a great platform for your mission critical applications.  There are a number of capacities that we have focused on

Workload Availability

Across the entirety of Hyper-V we have looked for opportunities to reduce and remove times when virtualized workloads are offline, both planned and unplanned.  Here is a sample of some of the features and capabilities that increase your workload availability:

• Rolling Cluster UpgradeWith Windows Server 2016, we’re building on Cross Version Live Migration from Windows Server 2012 R2 and taking it to the next level.  You can now upgrade a Windows Server 2012 R2 cluster to Windows Server 2016 with zero downtime, zero extra hardware requirements, and guaranteed availability throughout the process.  You can read more about this technology here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn850430.aspx
• Online resize of virtual machine memoryBuilding on our great feature of Dynamic Memory, you can now resize memory for virtual machines even when they are configured to use static memory.
• Hot add / remove of virtual network adaptersIt is now possible to add and remove network adapters from Generation 2 virtual machines without needing to turn them off first.
• Online resize support for Shared VHDX filesNeed to add more storage capacity to a virtualized cluster?  This is now easy to do while your critical virtualized application continues to run.
• And more…

Guaranteed Performance

In Windows Server 2012 R2, we introduced Storage Quality of Service which provided the ability to set hard caps on a per virtual disk basis per host. It’s a good solution for noisy neighbors on the same host and is dynamically configurable. This was a necessary and important step to what we’re delivering in Windows Server 2016, namely, cluster-wide Storage QoS with comprehensive monitoring and flexible and customizable policies. You can set policies at a granular level based on your business needs such as: per VM, per virtual disk, per service or per tenant. At a high level, it looks like this:

Manageable

We have also been working hard on ensuring that Hyper-V and Hyper-V virtual machines are easy to manage and troubleshoot.  Two big investments in this area are:

• Full support for alternate credentials in Hyper-V Manager and Hyper-V PowerShell.To help people manage Hyper-V in secure environments – you can now provide alternate credentials when connecting to remote servers.  This avoids the situation where administrators and needlessly using powerful credentials for non-essential tasks.
• PowerShell Direct to virtual machineYou can now run PowerShell commands directly in virtual machines from the host environment, provided you have the credentials for the guest operating system, with no need for extra configuration – or even network connectivity.  This allows for very powerful automation and orchestration of virtual machines.

As you can see, we’ve been busy and we look forward to your feedback with the Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 2 and again, our sincere thanks.

The post Enterprise-grade virtualization and next-gen app platform appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

Thought I would share an article or two from the Ask Premier Field Engineering Platform Team Blog.

I think everyone love’s checklists that you can just run through to make sure you didn’t miss anything and that your environment is good to go, right?  Well, how about this, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Best Practices (In Easy Checklist Form)? A checklist that uses real world best practices for Windows Server 2012 on Hyper-V Replica, Cluster Aware Updating (CAU), Network Virtualization and the Hyper-V Extensible Switch?  They promise to keep the list fresh and will be posting updates when they have them. So, try to make sure you subscribe to the feed for their blog.

As you know or maybe not, we have written about the issue about Slow Login and Slow Boot numerous times over the last year in an effort to address numerous tiny little issues that can impact a systems time to startup.  Well, the Supportability Team has put together a collection 90 hotfixes for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Systems. This is a huge accomplishment and I believe will address a lot of the issues that customers have had with their Boot times. Here is the link to the post from the ASK PFE Platforms team, Slow Boot Slow Login (SBSL) Hotfix Rollup for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 Available Today!

You can also go read the KB from the support team directly here, An enterprise hotfix rollup is available for Windows 7 Sp1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.

Hope you find these article helpful.

Kevin Beares
Senior Community Lead
Windows Server and System Center Group

The post Real World Best Practices for Hyper-V and update on Slow Login Hotfixes from the Premier Field Engineering Platform Team appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

Get on the wait list for an event in Belgrade, Serbia on February 11

Get on the wait list for an event in Perth, Australia on February 11

Get on the wait list for an event in Brisbane, Australia on February 12

Register now for an event in Bangkok, Thailand on February 27

If you’re in the neighborhood of one of these events, I urge you to register if you can or get on the wait list if you’re close to one of the sold-out sessions. You’ll be glad you did!

Thanks,

Christa Anderson

The post Final Stops for the Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow: Australia, Serbia, and Thailand! appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.

• Register for Introduction to Hyper-V  and Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals  today.
• Attend all or some of Introduction to Hyper-V on Thursday, January 24^th and Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals on Wednesday, January 30^th. Both classes are from 8am – 5pm PST
• Because you registered, you will get a follow up mail when the full course is made available online at the Microsoft Virtual Academy

Did I mention that the events are FREE? Both of these courses are designed for IT Pros that are either new to Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V or have experience with other virtualization technologies like Citrix or VMware.

There is another Jump Start course coming in late February , Microsoft Tools for VMware Integration/Migration Jump Start, The date is TBD. We will make sure to post a link to it when we have a date and registration link.

Hope you can make it and that you find these courses helpful.

The post Free Microsoft Virtual Academy Courses on Hyper-V and Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals appeared first on Microsoft Windows Server Blog.