Windows Server 2025 Ignite Announcements

During Microsoft Ignite this year, there was a four-hour session on the new and coming features in Windows Server 2025. It is clear that Microsoft has been putting a lot of development into the latest version of its server operating system. First, they announced that Windows Server is not going anywhere. They realize that for various reasons, latency, air-gapping, etc., organizations will always need to run server locally. They provided a roadmap that there will continue to be 20XX versions.
They are also making upgrades easier. In previous versions, if you wanted to do a direct upgrade, you needed to be only one, maybe two version back. Now, with Windows Server 2025, they are implementing a N-4 upgrade path. Meaning that you can do a direct upgrade (with media) starting with Windows Server 2012R2. Newer versions like 2019 and 2022 will be able to be upgraded directly from the Windows Update feature in the operating system.
There were also updates about Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct. Microsoft is currently working to implement the ReFS as a full replacement for NTFS. This is seen as the future and that NTFS needs to be retired. It was also announced that as of Ignite, Storage Spaces Direct an now coexist with traditional SAN arrays, with stretched site capabilities coming in December 2025. There are also security enhancements to the cloud witness.
To be a product many thought Microsoft was going to discontinue, it seems they may have decided to take on the #1 hypervisor in the world. While acknowledging, there is currently not 100% replacement for it (no matter what other vendors say), they are making a lot of advancements to the Hyper-V and see it as a “strategic technology”. Here are some notable changes:
• 4PB of memory and 2048 logical processors PER HOST
• 2040TB of memory and 2048 logical processors PER VM
• New conversion tool from VMware to Hyper-V
• Agentless migration
• Supports Windows and Linux migrations simultaneously
• Cluster aware migrations
• Up to 10 migrations, looking to upgrade to 20
• No changes to the original VM
• ARC enablement
• Conversion from VSAN
There is also a new “Virtualization” management page that is web-based. This includes management of up to 50 host, new tools for managing things like fabric, SAN, SDN, etc., and parallel operations. It provides a contextual view based on task for computer, storage, and networking. It is installed locally either a physical or virtual system and the only prerequisite is Visual C++.
As far as future features still in development, NVME everywhere. The current framework is still based on iSCSI. They are working to rewrite the entire stack based on the NVMe framework. This will reduce both CPU and memory consumption. This will improve the overall performance of the server. To enhance security, in January will come the ability to uninstall the WOW64 subsystem. This will be a full removal of the 32-bit features. In many cases, this is no longer needed. The OS will also become more module. Giving organization and administrators the ability to only install those features and functions that are truly needed. Part if this hardening will also include natively removing RC4 for Kerberos, WINS, VBScript, SMB1, Direct Access, and L2TP/PPTP.
Overall, it is obvious that Microsoft is continuing to innovate and make major improvements in the server operating system platform. While some of these changes are coming in December 2025 and January 2026, it will be interesting to see how long some of these other improvements take to become GA and the overall impact of performance on the system.