Announcing the General Availability of Windows Server IoT 2025!

We’re excited to announce the general availability of Windows Server IoT 2025! This release represents a pivotal achievement in our mission to deliver a secure, innovative, high-performance Windows Server IoT platform tailored to meet your needs. Windows Server IoT 2025 includes innovations in multiple areas, including advanced multi-layered security, hybrid cloud agility, AI, performance, and scale. For more information, see: Windows Server IoT documentation.

Advanced multi-layered security 

In an era where cybersecurity is paramount (see: Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2024 and Microsoft Threat Intelligence Medical Ransomware Report), Windows Server IoT 2025 features a suite of cutting-edge security features designed to protect your data and infrastructure. Here are some key features:

• Active Directory (AD): The highest standards for identity and authentication are further enhanced with new security features that help harden your environment against evolving threats through improved scalability and improvements in protocols, encryption, hardening, and new encryption support.

• File Services/Server Message Block (SMB) enhancements: Windows Server IoT 2025 includes SMB over QUIC for secure access to file shares over the Internet. SMB security also adds enhanced firewall defaults, brute force attack protection, and protection against man-in-the-middle attacks, relay attacks, and spoofing attacks.

• Managed Service Account (dMSA) Delegation: Unlike traditional service accounts, dMSA does not require manual password management because AD automatically manages passwords. dMSA allows you to delegate specific permissions to access resources in your domain, reducing security risks and providing better visibility and logs into service account activity.

These advanced security features make Windows Server IoT 2025 a powerful and secure platform for your IT infrastructure. Start 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 features:

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

• NVMe storage performance: Windows Server IoT 2025 delivers up to 70% more storage IOPS performance compared to Windows Server IoT 2022 on the same system.

• Storage space direct and storage flexibility: Windows Server IoT has supported a wide range of storage solutions, including local, NAS, and SAN, for decades and continues to this day. Windows Server IoT 2025 delivers more storage innovations with native ReFS deduplication and compression, thin-provisioned storage space, 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 available on Azure. Windows Server IoT 2025 Hyper-V virtual machine maximums:

• Maximum memory per VM: 240 terabytes* (10 times previous) 

• Maximum virtual processors per VM: 2048 VP* (~8.5x previous) 

*Requires Generation 2 VM

Windows Server IoT 2025 delivers major improvements across 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 virtualization solutions and those looking to leverage AI and machine learning while maintaining high performance and scalability.