Revolutionizing Network Management and Performance with ATC, HUD and AccelNet on Windows Server 2025

In an era where seamless network management and improved performance are paramount, the launch of Network ATC, Network HUD, and AccelNet for Windows Server 2025 is an important milestone. These groundbreaking innovations are designed to deliver unprecedented efficiency and reliability by optimizing the way you manage, monitor, and accelerate network operations.

Network ATC

Historically, deploying and managing networking for failover clusters has been complex and error-prone. The configuration flexibility of the host networking stack means that there are many moving parts that can easily be misconfigured or overlooked. As the underlying technology continues to improve, keeping up with the latest best practices can be challenging. Additionally, configuration consistency across failover cluster nodes is critical to reliability.

Network ATC simplifies the deployment and network configuration management of Windows Server 2025 clusters. Provides an intent-based approach to host network deployment. When a customer specifies one or more intents (management, compute, or storage) for a network adapter, we automate the deployment of the intended configuration.

Network ATC supports:

• reduce Host Networking Deployment hour, complexityand error
• distribution Latest version verified and supported by Microsoft Best Practices
• guarantee composition Consistency across clusters
• remove composition tendency

One of the biggest advantages of Network ATC is its ability to correct for configuration drift. Have you ever wondered, “Who changed that?” Or, “We must have missed this node.” With Network ATC, you’ll never have to worry about this problem again. Do you want to expand your cluster to add new nodes? Once you install the feature on a new node and join the cluster, the expected configuration is deployed within minutes.

Learn more about deploying and managing network ATC in Windows Server 2025 here. Deploying host networking using Network ATC. You can manage network ATC through Powershell cmdlets or Windows Admin Center.

Figure: Network ATC management in Windows Admin Center

Network HUD (coming soon)

Network HUD is an upcoming Windows Server 2025 feature that proactively identifies and resolves operational network issues.

Managing networks for business applications is difficult. Ensuring reliability and optimization requires coordination across the physical network (switches, cabling, NICs), host operating systems (virtual switches, virtual NICs), and applications running in VMs or containers. Each component has its own configuration and functionality and is often managed by a different team. Even with the perfect setup, misconfigurations in other parts of the network can result in poor performance.

With so many tools and technologies involved, the complexity of managing these components is at an all-time high. Windows Server OS provides a wealth of information through event logs, performance counters, and tools, but analyzing this data when a problem occurs often requires expertise and time after the problem occurs.

Network HUD By analyzing event logs, performance counters, tools like Pktmon, network traffic, and real-time data from physical devices, it excels at identifying problems before they occur. In most cases, problems are prevented by adjusting the system to prevent the problem from getting worse. If prevention is not possible, Network HUD alerts you with actionable messages to help you resolve the problem.

Network HUD leverages the capabilities of physical switches to ensure that the configuration matches the physical network. For example, you can verify that locally connected switch ports have the correct VLAN settings and the correct data center bridging configuration for RDMA storage traffic to function.

Network HUD is built as a true cloud service that runs on-premises. It is available as an Arc extension and becomes part of the Windows Server Azure Arc Management (WSAAM) service. This allows us to introduce more features and deliver them as they become available.

AccelNet

Accelerated Networking simplifies Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) management for virtual machines hosted on Windows Server 2025 clusters. SR-IOV provides a high-performance data path that bypasses the host, reducing latency, jitter, and CPU utilization for the most demanding network workloads. This is especially useful for high-performance computing (HPC) environments, real-time applications such as financial trading platforms, and virtualized network functions.

The following figure shows how two VMs communicate with and without SR-IOV.

Without SR-IOV, all networking traffic inside and outside the VM passes through the host and virtual switch. With SR-IOV, network traffic arriving at a VM’s network interface (NIC) is passed directly to the VM.

SR-IOV is available on Windows Server starting in 2012 R2. So what benefits does AccelNet offer?

1. Check prerequisites: Inform users whether their Windows Server cluster hosts support SR-IOV and check OS version and hyperthreading status, among other things.
2. Host Configuration: Ensure SR-IOV is enabled on the correct vSwitch hosting the virtual machine workload and allow reserved node configuration in case of failover to avoid resource oversubscription.
3. Simplified VM performance setup: Identifying the number of queue pairs required for a VM enabled via SR-IOV can be burdensome. AccelNet simplifies configuration by abstracting performance settings into “low,” “medium,” and “high.”
4. Health Monitoring and Diagnostics: Leverage network HUD to identify and resolve configuration/performance issues. Examples include NIC SR-IOV support, live migration management, etc. (coming soon).
5. Simplified management through Windows Admin Center: All AccelNet management features are available through Powershell and an easy-to-use UI through Windows Admin Center (coming soon).

AccelNet is part of the Windows Server Azure Arc Management (WSAAM) service. To learn more about Accelnet, check out: here.

As organizations continue to meet the challenges of an ever-evolving digital environment, integrating these advanced features into Windows Server 2025 will equip them with the tools they need to achieve superior network management and performance. Embrace the future of networking with Windows Server 2025 and experience the innovative features of Network ATC, Network HUD, and AccelNet.

We are excited to share all of these innovations with you. Try these features by upgrading to Windows Server 2025. We look forward to your feedback. If you have suggestions, comments, or concerns, please contact us at: edgenetfeedback@microsoft.com.