I am very excited to announce the General Availability of Windows Server IoT 2025! This release represents a pivotal achievement in our mission to deliver secure, innovative, and high-performance Windows Server IoT platform tailored to meet your needs. Windows Server IoT 2025 includes innovations in multiple areas including Advanced Multilayer Security, Hybrid Cloud Agility, and AI, Performance, & Scale. For more information, see Windows Server IoT documentation.

ADVANCED MULTILAYER 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 IoT 2025 stands out with a suite of cutting-edge 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 IoT 2025 includes SMB over QUIC to enable secure access to file shares over the internet. SMB security also adds hardened firewall defaults, brute force attack prevention, and protections for man in the middle attacks, relay attacks, and spoofing attacks.  

• Delegate Managed Service Accounts (dMSA): Unlike traditional service accounts, dMSAs don’t require manual password management since AD automatically takes care of it. With dMSAs, specific permissions can be delegated to access resources in the domain, which reduces security risks and provides better visibility and logs of service account activity.  

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

AI, PERFORMANCE, AND SCALE  

Windows Server IoT 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 IoT 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 IoT 2025 delivers up to 70% more storage IOPs performance compared to Windows Server IoT 2022 on identical systems.  

• Storage Spaces Direct and Storage Flexibility: Windows Server IoT supports a wide range of storage solutions such as local, NAS, and SAN for decades and continues to this day. Windows Server IoT 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 IoT 2025.  

• Hyper-V Performance and Scale: Windows Server IoT 2025 introduces massive performance and scalability improvements that come from Azure. Windows Server IoT 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 IoT 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 IoT 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.  

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