What is a server? Is that a silly question? I don’t think so. It’s a good question to ponder, especially now that the definition of servers and server workloads changes on a regular basis. The answer to this question for Windows clients is simpler. A Windows client machine is a requester, consumer, and contributor of data.

Data is life for many businesses. Where is this data kept? From where is this data being pushed and pulled? What enables the mechanisms and applications running on the client operating systems to interface with this data? What secures these users and their data? The answers to these questions reveal the purpose of servers in general. Servers house, protect, and serve up data to be consumed by clients.

Everything revolves around data in business today. Our email, documents, databases, customer lists—everything that we need to do business—is data. That data is critical to us. Servers are what we use to build the fabric upon which we trust our data to reside.

We traditionally think about servers using a client-server interface mentality. A user opens a program on their client computer, this program reaches out to a server in order to retrieve something, and the server responds as needed. This idea can be correctly applied to almost every transaction you may have with a server. When your domain-joined computer needs to authenticate you as a user, it reaches out to Active Directory on the server to validate your credentials and receive an authentication token. When you need to contact a resource by name, your computer asks a DNS server how to get there. If you need to open a file, you ask the file server to send it your way.

Servers are designed to be the brains of our operation, and often by doing so transparently. In recent years, large strides have been taken to ensure resources are always available and accessible in ways that don’t require training or a large effort on the part of our employees. It used to be true that the general user population knew the name of your server and how to contact it because that was required for them to be able to get the information they needed.

If their mapped drives disappeared, it wasn’t uncommon that everyone would know how to throw \\server\share into File Explorer to get there via plan B.

It also used to be the case that your average business only ran one single server, enabling plan B above to be true. Today, our server landscape is vastly different, with even small businesses running a virtualization host that typically contains a dozen or more virtual servers, and much effort is made so that your workforce doesn’t know or care anything about that server infrastructure; they simply expect to have access to their data, 100% of the time.

In most organizations, many different servers are needed to provide your workforce with the capabilities they require. Each service inside Windows Server is provided as, or as part of, a role. When you talk about needing new servers or configuring a new server for any particular task, what you are really referring to is the individual role or roles that are going to be configured on that server to get the work done. A server without any roles installed is useless, though, depending on the chassis, could make an excellent paperweight. A 3U SAN device could weigh upward of 100 pounds and keep your desk orderly even in the middle of a hurricane!

If you think of roles as the meat and potatoes of a server, then the next bit we will discuss is sort of like adding salt and pepper. Beyond the overhead roles you will install and configure on your servers, Windows also contains many features that can be installed, which sometimes stand alone but, more often, complement specific roles in the operating system. Features may add functionality to the base operating system, as is the case with Telnet Client. Or, a feature may be added to a server in order to enhance an existing role, such as adding the Network Load Balancing feature to an already equipped remote access or IIS server. The combination of roles and features inside Windows Server is what equips that piece of metal to do work.

This book will, quite obviously, focus on a Microsoft-centric infrastructure. In these environments, the Windows Server operating system is king and is prevalent across all facets of technology. There are alternatives to Windows Server and different products that can provide some of the same functions for an organization, but it is quite rare to find a business environment anywhere that is running without some semblance of a Microsoft infrastructure.

Windows Server contains an incredible amount of technology, all wrapped up in one small installation disk. With Windows Server 2025, Microsoft has us thinking out of the box about what it means to be a server in the first place, and it comes with some exciting new capabilities, which we will spend time covering in these pages. Things such as PowerShell, containers, Windows Admin Center, software-defined storage, and software-defined networking are changing the way that we manage and size our computing environments; these are exciting times to be or to become a server administrator!

The cloud. You’ve probably heard of it. In fact, you have likely heard it in many different contexts, some of which don’t make any sense at all. That is the power of a buzzword in the technical world; it often ends up misused and spoken of inappropriately. Those things aside, the idea of cloud infrastructure is an incredibly powerful one that anybody working in IT needs to understand.

A cloud fabric is one that revolves around virtual resources—virtual machines (VMs), virtual disks, and even virtual networks. Being “plugged into” the cloud typically enables things such as the ability to spin up new servers on a whim, or even the ability for particular services themselves to increase or decrease their needed resources automatically, based on utilization.

Think of a simple e-commerce website where a consumer can go to order goods. Perhaps 75% of the year, the company can operate this website on a single web server with limited resources, resulting in a fairly low cost of service. But the other 25% of the year, maybe around the holiday seasons, utilization ramps way up, requiring much more computing power. Prior to cloud mentality, this would mean that the company would need to size its environment to fit the maximum requirements all the time, in case it was ever needed. They would be paying for more servers and much more computing power than was needed for much of the year. With a cloud fabric, which gives the website the ability to increase or decrease the number of servers it has at its disposal as needed, the total cost of such a website or service can be drastically decreased. This is a major driving factor of the cloud in business today.

Public cloud

Most of the time, when your neighbor Suzzi Knowitall talks to you about the cloud, she is simply talking about the internet. Well, more accurately, she is talking about some service that she uses, which she connects to by using the internet. For example, Office 365, Google Drive, OneDrive, and Dropbox—these are all public cloud resources, as they store your data in the cloud. In reality, your data is just sitting on servers that you access via the internet, but you can’t see those servers, and you don’t have to administer and maintain those servers, which is why it feels like magic and is then referred to as the cloud.

To IT departments, the term cloud more often means one of the big three cloud hosting providers. Since this is a Microsoft-driven book, and since I truly feel this way anyway, Microsoft Azure is top-notch in this category. Azure itself is another topic for another book (or many other books), but it is a centralized cloud computing architecture that can host your data, your services, or even your entire network of servers.

Moving your datacenter to Azure enables you to stop worrying or caring about server hardware, replacing hard drives, and much more. Rather than purchasing servers, unboxing them, racking them, installing Windows on them, and then setting up the roles you want configured, you simply click a few buttons to spin up new virtual servers that can be resized at any time for growth. You then pay ongoing op-ex costs for these servers—monthly or annual fees for running systems in the cloud—rather than the big upfront cap-ex costs for server hardware.

Other cloud providers with similar capabilities are numerous, but the big three are Azure, Amazon (AWS), and Google. As far as enterprise is concerned, Azure simply takes the cake and eats it too. I’m not sure that the others will ever be able to catch up with all of the changes and updates that Microsoft constantly makes to the Azure infrastructure.

Private cloud

While most people working in the IT sector these days have a pretty good understanding of what it means to be part of a cloud service, and many are indeed doing so today, a term that is being pushed into enterprises everywhere and is still often misunderstood is private cloud. At first, I took this to be a silly marketing ploy, a gross misuse of the term “cloud” to try and appeal to those hooked by buzzwords. Boy, was I wrong. In the early days of private clouds, the technology wasn’t quite ready to stand up to what was being advertised.

Today, however, that story has changed. It is now entirely possible to take the same fabric that is running up in the true public cloud and install it right inside your datacenter. This enables you to provide your company with cloud benefits such as the ability to spin resources up and down, run everything virtualized, and implement all of the neat tips and tricks of cloud environments, with all of the serving power and data storage remaining locally owned and secured by you. Trusting cloud storage companies to keep data safe and secure is absolutely one of the biggest blockers to implementation on the true public cloud, but by installing your own private cloud, you get the best of both worlds—stretchable compute environments with the security of knowing you still control and own all of your data.

This is not a book about clouds, public or private. I mention this to give a baseline for some of the items we will discuss in later chapters, and also to get your mouth watering a little bit to dig in and do a little reading yourself on cloud technology. You will find that Windows Server 2025 interacts in many ways with the cloud, and you will notice that so many of the underlying systems available in Server 2025 are similar to, if not the same as, those becoming available in Microsoft Azure.

In these pages, we will not focus on the capabilities of Azure, but rather a more traditional sense of Windows Server as would be utilized on-premises. With the big push toward cloud technologies, it’s easy to get caught with blinders on and think that everything and everyone is quickly running to the cloud for all of their technology needs, but it simply isn’t true. Most companies will have the need for many on-premise servers for many years to come; in fact, many may never put full trust in the cloud and will forever maintain their own datacenters. These datacenters will have local servers, which will require server administrators to manage them. That’s where you come in.

Anyone who has worked with the design or installation of Windows Server in recent years is probably wondering which direction we are taking in this book. You see, there are different capability editions, different technical versions, plus different licensing models of Windows Server. Let’s take a few minutes to cover those differences to give you a well-rounded knowledge of the different options, and so that we can define which portions we plan to discuss over the course of this book.

Standard versus Datacenter

When installing the Windows Server 2025 operating system onto a piece of hardware, as you will experience in Chapter 2, Installation and Management, you will encounter two different choices of server capability:

• The first is Server 2025 Standard, which is the default option and one that includes most of your traditional Windows Server roles. While I cannot give you firm details on pricing because that could potentially be different for every company, depending on your agreements with Microsoft, Standard is the cheaper option and is most commonly used for installations of Windows Server 2025.
• Datacenter, on the other hand, is the luxury model. There are some roles and features within Windows Server 2025 that only work with the Datacenter version of the operating system, and they are not available in Standard. If ever you are looking for a new piece of Microsoft technology to serve a purpose in your environment, make sure to check the requirements to find out whether you will have to build a Datacenter server. Keep in mind that Datacenter can cost significantly more money than Standard, so you generally only use it in places where it is actually required. For example, if you are interested in hosting a Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) environment, you will be required to run the Server 2025 Datacenter edition on those servers.

One of the biggest differences between Standard and Datacenter that even small businesses may need to consider is the number of Virtual Machines (VMs) that they can legally host. Out-of-the-box Server 2025 Standard can only run two VMs at any given time, which is a pretty limiting factor if you are looking to build out a Hyper-V server. Datacenter allows you to run an unlimited number of VMs, which makes it a no-brainer when building your virtualization host servers. For running Hyper-V, the Datacenter edition is often the way to go.

There is more information on this topic that makes the previous paragraph complicated. Both Server 2025 Standard and Server 2025 Datacenter have the technical ability to run many VMs. Whether or not you are allowed to do so comes down to licensing. We will discuss more on this topic when we talk about Windows Server licensing structures later in this chapter.

Running a container infrastructure will also impact your decision-making on Windows Server licensing. While your host container server can run an unlimited number of traditional containers, whether that host server is Windows Server Standard or Datacenter, if you want to move into the enhanced world of Hyper-V-isolated containers, similar restrictions apply. A container host server running Windows Server Standard is limited to running two Hyper-V containers, but bumping up your host to Windows Server Datacenter will bring you back into the unlimited category. An easy way to remember this is that each Hyper-V container is essentially its own VM, and so the limit of two applies in the Standard OS, whether talking about regular VMs or Hyper-V container VMs. Again, remember that this is a licensing limitation, not a technical one.

Windows Server 2025 Essentials

Some of you may remember the Small Business Server (SBS) editions of Windows Server, which were sort of an all-in-one variant of the Windows Server operating system, intended to be the one and only server inside a small business environment. While SBS fell by the wayside many years ago, Microsoft has offered an Essentials edition of each Windows Server release since that time, to fill the small business gap. If your organization has fewer than 25 users and fewer than 50 devices, and if you do not intend to grow beyond that point, purchasing and installing Windows Server 2025 Essentials can be a coupon clipper to getting your data infrastructure up and running in a cost-friendly way. Keep in mind that it comes with limitations, and as soon as you want to grow your business to more than 25 users, you’ll have to bite the bullet, purchase Server Standard, and migrate over to it.

Windows Server 2025 Datacenter: Azure Edition

Hold up, what is this thing? The Windows Server 2022 rollout introduced us to this brand-new thing, a special version of Windows Server that obviously has some tie-ins to Azure. But what does this mean for you? Whether or not you will ever touch the new Azure Edition depends on what kinds of things you are doing in the Azure world. If you host virtual machines in Azure, you now have the option of selecting your new VM to run this special Azure Edition, and it then enables some cool new features that are unique to this edition. What is most interesting to me about the latest 2025 release of Azure Edition is that some of the capabilities that you could only find through 2022 Azure Edition have now been ported over into the normal Server 2025 Datacenter. For example, in 2022, you could only do hotpatching and SMB over QUIC if you deployed 2022 Azure Edition. This is no longer the case, and both of those functions exist in normal Server 2025 Datacenter. However, new feature sets were added to 2025 Azure Edition that do not (yet) exist in normal 2025 Datacenter, so you see how this trend continues.

The big catch with Azure Edition is just that—it can only run in an Azure environment. So if you have Azure cloud-hosted VMs, you can now get those VMs to run Azure Edition. Without making this too complicated, since we are talking mostly about on-premise resources in this book, there is one other special scenario where you might be able to run Windows Server 2025 Azure Edition from within the physical walls of your building. That is for those of you running something called Azure Local (formerly known as Azure Stack HCI). The scope of this book does not include Azure Local, but the easiest way to think about it is the point where rubber meets the road for a private cloud, which we already discussed. It is possible to build your own implementation of Azure, right inside your own datacenter, using Azure Local. If you are running a private cloud such as this, you will then be able to run VMs within that environment that use Windows Server 2025 Datacenter: Azure Edition.

Three different user interfaces

Now let’s discuss the different footprints and user interfaces that you can run on your Windows Server 2025 machines. There are two variants of Windows Server that can be used, and we will also fill in some history about a third option that used to exist and is still often a complication in this topic. Choosing the correct interface depends on what capabilities and security you are looking for.

Desktop Experience

This is the most common choice among Windows Servers everywhere. Whether you are building Windows Server 2025 Standard or Datacenter, you have a choice of running Windows Server with or without a graphical user interface. The point-and-click interface with a traditional look and feel is called Desktop Experience. This allows things such as RDPing into your servers, having a traditional desktop, and being able to use the graphical Server Manager right from your logged-in server, and all in all, it is the best way to go if you are new to server administration.

If you are familiar with navigating around inside Windows 11, then you should be able to at least make your way around Windows Server 2025 running Desktop Experience. This is the version of Windows Server 2025 that we will focus on for the majority of this book, and almost all of the screenshots will be taken from within a Desktop Experience environment.

Server Core

As you will see when we install Windows Server 2025 together, the default option for installation is not Desktop Experience. What this means is that choosing the default install path would instead place a headless version of Windows Server onto your machine, most commonly referred to as Server Core.

The nature of being headless makes Server Core faster and more efficient than the Desktop version, which makes sense because it doesn’t have to run all of that extra code and consume all of those extra resources for launching and displaying a huge graphical interface.

Almost anything that you want to do within Windows Server is possible to do on either Server Core or Desktop Experience, the main differences being the interface and security. To be able to use Server Core, you definitely have to be comfortable with a command-line interface (namely PowerShell), and you also have to consider remote server management to be a reliable way of interacting with your servers. We will talk much more about Server Core in Chapter 11, Server Core.

The largest benefit that Server Core brings to the table, other than performance, is security. Most malware that attempts to attack Windows Servers is reliant upon items that exist inside the GUI of Desktop Experience. Since those things aren’t even running inside Server Core—alas, you couldn’t get to a desktop even if you wanted to—attacks against Server Core machines are far, far less successful.

Nano Server – now only for containers

A third platform for Windows Server 2025 does exist, known as Nano Server. This is a tiny version of Windows Server, headless like Server Core but running an even smaller footprint. The last time I booted up Nano Server, it consumed less than 500 MB of data for the complete operating system, which is incredible.

Nano Server was a hot topic surrounding the release of Server 2016, because at that time, Microsoft was pressing forward with plans to include a whole bunch of roles inside Nano Server so that we could start replacing some of our bloated, oversized everyday servers with Nano. It used to be the case that you could use the Windows Server installation media (I suppose you could still make it happen with Server 2016 installation media) to spin out a VHDX file that allowed you to boot into Nano Server and check it out, but that mentality of Nano Server as an actual server has since gone by the wayside.

As of Windows Server version 1803 (we’ll discuss what Server 1803 means in the next section of this chapter), Nano Server is married to the use of containers. In fact, the only way to spin up a Nano Server is to download it as a container base OS image, and then boot that image on an existing container host server. We will discuss both in more detail in Chapter 14, Containers. If you know what containers and modern applications are, and are interested in using them, then you will benefit from learning all there is to know about Nano Server. If you are not in a position to work with containers, you will probably never run into Nano Server in your environment.

Licensing models – what happened to SAC?

Up until the release of Windows Server 2022, you had a decision to make on which licensing model and release cadence you wanted to follow. Microsoft releases some versions of Windows Server, the ones you are likely familiar with, on a 2–3 year basis, and other versions on a biannual cadence. Can you imagine new versions of Windows Server shipping twice a year? I would imagine that to be a very difficult thing to keep up with for both manufacturer and consumer, and as of August 2022, that reality seems to have sunk in as we experienced the demise of this super-aggressive release cadence. Let’s discuss the ways that Windows Server versions roll out and what changed in 2022.

Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC)

Some of you probably think that LTSC is a typo, as in previous years, this model was called Long-Term Servicing Branch (LTSB). While you can go with either, and people will generally know what you are talking about, LTSC is now the proper term.

Windows Server 2025 is an LTSC release. Essentially, LTSC releases are what we have always thought of as our traditional Windows Server operating system releases. Server 2008, Server 2008 R2, Server 2012, Server 2012 R2, Server 2016, Server 2019, Server 2022, and now Server 2025 are all LTSC releases. It is Microsoft’s expectation that LTSC versions of Windows Server will continue to be released every 2–3 years, and will include both headless as well as full graphical interface flavors of the operating system.

LTSC versions of Windows Server have always been the most common; indeed, many IT administrators have never even heard of the alternative Semi-Annual Channel (SAC) releases. Anytime that you are building a server with the intention of utilizing Desktop Experience for a fully graphical interface, your only option is LTSC anyway. It has always made the most sense for any servers running with the purpose of a domain controller, certificate server, file server, and so on to run within the context of LTSC.

With LTSC versions of Windows Server, you continue to get the same support we are used to seeing from Microsoft operating systems: five years of mainstream support followed by five years of available extended support.

Throughout this book, we will work and gain experience with Windows Server 2025—the LTSC release, which is now the only release.

Semi-Annual Channel (SAC) (now retired)

While this is now mostly irrelevant, it is still good to understand the history of SAC, and indeed, you may well encounter SAC releases of Windows Server in your IT escapades. The first thing you will notice when stumbling upon an SAC release of Windows Server is the strange naming convention for operating system versions. Rather than calling it Server 2019, you were really running Windows Server 1803, 1809, 1903, 1909, and so on. It followed the same mentality and release cadence that Windows 10 did. What that implies is that these new versions of Windows Server SAC were released at much shorter intervals than LTSC. The SAC channel received two major releases every year—generally in the spring and the fall. Because of this fast release cadence, support for SAC versions of Windows Server lasted for a short 18 months. If you use SAC, you had better get used to always jumping on the latest version shortly after it releases.

If swapping out your server operating systems twice a year sounds daunting, you’re not alone. Thankfully, Microsoft recognizes this and realizes that the general server administrator population is not going to use this model for their regular, everyday servers. Rather, SAC versions of Windows Server were only ever going to be used to run containers and containerized applications. In this new world of flexible application hosting, where applications are being written in ways that the infrastructure resources behind those applications can be spun up or spun down as needed, containers are a very important piece of that DevOps puzzle. If you host or build these kinds of applications, you will almost certainly be using containers—now or in the future. When you find yourself in the position of researching and figuring out containers, you may then stumble on information and documentation that leads you to those older SAC server releases.

It is important to note that SAC versions of Windows Server only came in the Server Core flavor—you’ll find no graphical desktop interface here!

While Microsoft has officially retired SAC licensing and operating systems as of August 2022, customers heavily into containerization may still find some similar benefits by moving to Azure Local (formerly Azure Stack HCI).

License purchase and packs

When defining differences between the Standard and Datacenter versions of Windows Server 2025, we referenced the fact that “out-of-the-box” Server 2025 Standard allows for the running of two VMs, but that it wasn’t a technical limitation and that more VMs were possible. This idea segues into a bit of a confusing topic—the way that Windows Server is licensed. When you purchase “a Windows Server 2025 Standard License,” you are purchasing the rights to install Server 2025 Standard onto one physical piece of hardware, and to run two VMs on top of that host operating system. In effect, you can run three instances of Windows Server 2025 Standard. As soon as you make your move to spin up a third VM, you are required to repurchase the same amount of licensing all over again. Doing so actually gives you the ability to then run a total of four VMs. So if you only need three, well… too bad; you pay for four. Effectively, you repurchase your Windows Server 2025 Standard licensing for every two additional VMs that you need to run.

In addition to considering the number of VMs, the amount of licensing you purchase in the first place depends on the size of your hardware. More specifically, it depends on the processors you have installed.

Core packs (physical server licensing)

Here is where things get a little dicey. You must license each physical server based on the number of processor cores that exist inside it. Most physical servers contain one or two CPUs. The number of cores that those CPUs contain could be vastly different. What you are required to license is the number of cores.

Hyperthreading doesn’t count. If you have one CPU with one core and it can do hyperthreading (logical cores), this counts as one core. If you have dual CPUs, each with 8 cores, now we’re talking about 16 cores in total. This is the number to license.

There is some confusing history about why these are called core packs instead of simply core licenses, but since you can never purchase a single core license (why would you, since CPU cores always come in even numbers), you will always be purchasing packs of licensing, core packs.

Except… (this is the moment when you realize why large companies employ full-time staff just to deal with licensing)… there are also some rules of minimum license purchase. You cannot cover a server with four core packs, because Microsoft says you can’t. Here are the rules of a minimum license purchase:

• Any physical server requires a minimum of 16 cores to be licensed.
• Even if your server has fewer than 16 cores, you must adhere to the prior rule and license for at least 16 cores.
• Every physical CPU requires at least 8 cores to be licensed, whether or not that CPU has 8 cores. But again, even if your server has only 1 CPU with 8 cores, you must still license the server for 16 cores based on the server-level minimum.

Wow, that is a lot of rules. Ultimately, many physical servers in smaller businesses will fall into the category of requiring a minimum of 16 cores to be licensed. That’s easy math, and in fact, when faced with purchasing Windows Server licensing, you will find that most places offer a 16-CPU core pack, which perfectly fits that need. When you grow your hardware to contain more than 16 CPU cores, you pull out the calculator and start purchasing additional core packs.

vCore licensing (virtual server licensing)

Most on-premise servers that I encounter continue to be licensed by physical CPU cores, but introduced to us in late 2022 was the idea of per-VM licensing, instead of physical server licensing. vCore licensing is what it sounds like, licensing for Windows Server based on the number of vCPU cores you are running, instead of physical CPU cores. There are also a couple of minimums to keep in mind with vCore licensing:

• Each VM must be licensed for at least 8 virtual cores. If you have a smaller VM that uses fewer than 8 cores, you’ll still have to pay for 8.
• Each customer requires a minimum of 16 virtual cores.

You may be tempted to start looking into vCores and running numbers to find out whether this new licensing model is cheaper for your environment, but there is one large caveat to keep in mind. Per-VM licensing was created for a specific purpose, primarily if you have a reason to run a small number of VMs on a large host, where physical licensing costs don’t make sense. This can sometimes be the case in cloud or hybrid-cloud scenarios, where you are using or renting host space from another entity. One requirement for vCore licensing that will be a determining factor for many businesses as to whether it can be used is that vCore licenses are only available to customers with active Software Assurance or subscription licenses.

At what point do I turn to Datacenter?

The Server 2025 Standard licensing strategy is scalable up to a certain point. Technically, you could forever increase the licensing that you purchase and the VMs that you run with that licensing, but wait a minute—didn’t we say that Server 2025 Datacenter permits you to run unlimited VMs? Indeed we did. While Server 2025 Datacenter costs a lot more than Server 2025 Standard, if you are facing a requirement to run many virtual machines, it may be more cost-effective to simply purchase Datacenter and not have to deal with all of the intricacies of Standard licensing.

The breaking point is usually around 12 VMs. If you run 12 or fewer VMs on a single server, you will likely save some money by running the numbers on Standard licensing, but it depends on what physical CPUs you have. If you need to run more than 12 VMs, it is most likely true that purchasing a single (16-core) Datacenter license will be your cheaper option.

Client Access Licenses (CALs)

So far, all we have talked about is Windows Server licensing, just for the server side. Microsoft also requires businesses to purchase and own CALs, to cover any user who needs to connect to resources on that server. This one is more straightforward to calculate—add up the numbers of users that you are going to point to resources on your server, and make sure you purchase that many (or more) CALs. Oftentimes, when you purchase Windows Server licensing, you will find options that combine server and CAL licensing, such as “Server 2025 16 core licenses + 25 CALs.”

If you have ever purchased CALs before, there is a decent chance you have been building a new server or implementing a Remote Desktop Services (RDS) environment. We will discuss RDS much more in an upcoming chapter on the topic, but RDS CALs are one type of CAL that you may find yourself purchasing, even on top of your normal Windows Server CALs. Out of the box, any Windows Server allows two user accounts to RDP into it at the same time, but no more. When implementing an RDS server, you often want many more people to be able to connect at the same time. The purchase and installation of RDS CALs is necessary for that to work properly.

Pay-as-you-go licensing

Whoa, what is this?? With the advent of Windows Server 2025, Microsoft has released a brand new way to pay for your Server 2025 instances, without needing to purchase cap-ex style perpetual licenses or core packs whatsoever. Enter pay-as-you-go licensing. Key to success with this new venture, the servers you are deploying must be tapped into Azure Arc (more on that later in this book). Assuming that you have Arc-enabled your servers, you can now license them through your Azure subscription, the cost as of this writing being $33.58 USD per CPU core, per month. As with most things in Azure, you only pay for what you need.

The newest version of the Windows Server operating system is always an evolution of its predecessor. There are certainly pieces of technology contained inside that are brand-new, but there are even more places where existing technologies have been updated to include new features and functionality. In the case of Windows Server 2025, there are even some functions and features that are specifically called out by Microsoft as being deprecated and leaving us for good. As is often the case with Microsoft operating system releases, there are many intricate and under-the-hood changes, but not all of them are going to impact the way that you work on servers. For a full list of changes, you can simply visit Microsoft’s Learn documentation, search “What’s new in Server 2025?”, and get a play-by-play. Re-creating a cut and paste list here would be insulting to you as a reader and able-bodied IT person, so for the purposes of this chapter, I have selected new and updated feature sets that genuinely interest me as I believe these will also be the most interesting changes to you, in the businesses that you support. Let’s spend a few minutes providing an overview of some (truly interesting) changes that exist in Windows Server 2025.

CPU compatibility

For anyone who has worked with Windows Server for a long time, you likely hold it in your mind as tightly bound with Intel Xeon processors. Historically, I have found it quite rare to experience a production physical server that is running anything other than Xeon CPUs. This mindset may suddenly shift with Windows Server 2025, as Microsoft now supports a range of both Intel and AMD processors to run its latest operating system.

Updated in-place upgrades

If you’ve been following Microsoft’s progression of Windows Server through the years, and have helped to bring environments from 2016 -> 2019 -> 2022, you probably realize already that the in-place upgrade option has been significantly enhanced and improved over these years. Upgrading servers used to be a real challenge, and it was often easier to simply create a brand new server and transition your roles and data to it. I would say that starting with Server 2019, the option to in-place upgrade really stabilized and has continued to improve in the years since. Why are we talking about it in the “What’s new?” section? Because you can now in-place upgrade a server right from inside Windows Update settings! This is common knowledge in the Win10 -> Win11 world, but unprecedented for Windows Server. Shortly, we will spend some time installing Windows and upgrading a previous Windows Server to 2025, and we’ll also test out this new capability to allow that server to self-install Server 2025 by simply clicking some buttons inside the Windows Update settings. This is the same mechanism that Windows workstations have used to implement in-place feature updates for years. While the new Windows Update single-button mechanism for upgrading is only available on very recent servers, Microsoft has also expanded in-place upgrade capabilities when using the Windows Server 2025 installation media. As long as you have that ISO or DVD from which you can launch into an installer, you can perform what is known as N-4 versioning. That is, you can in-place upgrade 4 versions at a time! What this means in plain text is that you can pop Windows Server 2025 installation media into Windows Server 2012 R2 (or anything newer), and it will in-place upgrade all the way to Windows Server 2025. Holy moly, that is impressive.

Hotpatching

Windows Server hotpatching is an idea that came to light during the Server 2022 release, but only pertained to servers running the special Windows Server 2022 Azure Edition SKU. I recently attended a Microsoft presentation where it was made known, at no surprise to anyone, that hotpatching was by far the #1 requested update for Windows Server 2025’s release.

Now integrated into Windows Server 2025, with no reliance on the special Azure Edition version, hotpatching enables your servers to continue patching their regular monthly patch cycle, without rebooting! Microsoft releases and installs these monthly security patches in a new way that puts the updated code into place in real time, no longer requiring a restart of those services or the operating system to bring them to life. Then, once per quarter, Microsoft releases a more traditional round of updates that do require a restart, but seriously, if we could get away with restarting servers once per quarter rather than once per month, think about all of the increased uptime percentages and decreased headaches with planning out maintenance windows.

One very important thing to remember with hotpatching: even though this capability is now built into any version of Windows Server 2025, it can only be employed if your server(s) are tapped into Azure Arc, as this is the mechanism through which hotpatching is administered and managed.

The Windows 11 experience is here!

It was a surprise to many when Windows Server 2022 hit shelves still running a Windows 10 graphical interface, as Windows 11 was already in the wild. Whatever rough edges existed at the time have now been polished, and Windows Server 2025 looks and feels like Windows 11. At this point, Win11 should be familiar territory for anyone who regularly works in IT or with computers at all. It will be nice to fall back into standards when bouncing between workstations and servers in Microsoft-centric infrastructures. Bringing the Windows 11 experience to Server 2025 also brings related toolsets, such as the current Windows Terminal and the updated Task Manager, both of which we will explore within this book.

Azure Edition

We already discussed Windows Server 2025 Datacenter: Azure Edition, but it is still worth calling out that this Azure-specific version still exists and is updated in 2025. Previously, hotpatching and SMB-over-QUIC were two of the primary differentiators between a classic Server 2022 and the Azure Edition, and it is worth noting again that Microsoft is really listening to its audience, as they have now pulled these two great technologies into every version of Windows Server 2025, making them more accessible to the masses.

Bluetooth

In Windows Server 2025, we now have Bluetooth, because…why not? I’m not sure how often this will be utilized, but you can now tap Bluetooth keyboards, mice, headphones, and so on directly to your servers. Maybe this will be particularly useful for developers who might be running Server 2025 on their local workstations as they build out new software (for those not familiar with containers, anyway).

Wireless networking

Similar to my feelings about Bluetooth, when I first saw this, I almost laughed out loud. Are people really going to wirelessly connect Windows Servers? I do have to admit that wireless connectivity has improved dramatically over the past 10 years, and if you’re interested in wirelessly connecting your server, the Wireless LAN Service feature is now installed by default. Microsoft doesn’t really expect this to be a common need, though, and so the service is configured to manually start by default. You will need to intentionally start the service in order to use wireless on your new server.

Microsoft accounts

Most reading this have probably added Entra accounts, Microsoft accounts, or Microsoft work/school accounts to various Windows 10 or Windows 11 computers through the Settings -> Accounts tool. This same capability to make the operating system integrally aware of a Microsoft account now exists in Windows Server 2025 as well.

Credential Guard

Credential Guard has been around as a technology for a while, but is now enabled by default in Windows Server 2025, as long as your system meets hardware and licensing requirements. This is a technology that greatly improves security surrounding NTLM passwords, Kerberos tickets, and the credentials that get stored in Windows by applications. You’ve probably heard about pass-the-hash and pass-the-ticket attacks, and Credential Guard helps to block those types of attacks from happening.

Azure Local

Formerly called Azure Stack HCI, Azure Local is essentially a mechanism to utilize Windows Server 2025 to build your own private cloud. This enables you to employ Azure-specific capabilities, capacities, and protections within your physical building.

Windows Admin Center (WAC)

WAC originally came to us around the same time as Windows Server 2019, and really built some steam with the release of Server 2022. With 2025’s release, WAC is even more tightly integrated with Microsoft’s cloud services, now being tied into Azure Arc. This enables you to manage your Windows Server instances from inside the Azure Arc portal, whether your servers are on-prem or cloud-based!

To be clear, you can still run Windows Admin Center on a local server and allow it to manage your servers, without using Azure Arc at all. In fact, we will be deploying this free tool together later in this book.

Active Directory improvements

There is so much talk about Azure, it can feel like the classic Windows Server is dying. My perception is quite the opposite; the truth in many cloud migration cases is that we are still running regular ole Windows Server instances—they just happen to live in the cloud on Microsoft’s hardware instead of our own. It may seem surprising that Microsoft has pumped a bunch of improvements into something as classic as Active Directory, but ultimately, AD is timeless and will still be around for decades to come. There is quite a list of under-the-hood improvements that have been made to Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) with the release of Windows Server 2025, most of which you probably wouldn’t care too much about. One stand-out is a major improvement to the JET database that underpins AD, which has been using 8k-sized page files since the year 1999. These pages have now been increased to 32k, a 4x increase, which removes AD object limitations that have always existed in the past. Additionally, default machine account passwords have increased security by using randomly generated computer account passwords, and AD DS can now utilize Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) to take advantage of CPUs in all processor groups, where previously it could only use a single group.

Active Directory also gains some major security improvements, now utilizing current algorithms and encryption methods. For example, LDAP now supports TLS1.3 and Kerberos can run AES SHA256/384.

Delegated Managed Service Accounts (dMSA)

Service accounts in Active Directory have always been a necessary and important tool, but they can be used for evil just as quickly as for good. New with Windows Server 2025, dMSAs link the authentication of these accounts directly to a device’s identity in AD, which prevents attackers from harvesting credentials through a compromised account.

Dynamic Tracing (DTrace)

DTrace is not a brand-new toolset, but previously required installation in Windows. With Windows Server 2025, DTrace is now included out of the box, accessed via your favorite command line. This utility allows for monitoring and debugging of real-time system performance, and can even script actions to be taken based on monitored probes. We will take a closer look at DTrace in our last chapter, Troubleshooting.

Windows Local Administrator Password Solution (LAPS)

LAPS has been around for a long time, but is historically underutilized. Fresh attention has been given to this technology, which is a centralized management tool used to control local administrator passwords on all of your domain-joined machines. With LAPS, it is possible for every workstation to always have a unique local administrator password, which will keep attackers guessing for a very long time. New LAPS policies allow you to specify things such as the length of passwords and using word phrases instead of random characters for easier readability. There is a new AD attribute as well, called msLAPS-CurrentPasswordVersion, that helps to solve issues caused by reimaging or rolling back workstations, where in the past that action could cause the local administrator password to be out of sync between the workstation and AD, and AD would never update itself to store the correct password. Now it can. We’ll take a look at LAPS as we implement it together later, in our chapter on security.

ReFS improvements

The Resilient File System, better known as ReFS, has some under-the-hood improvements in Server 2025 that should automatically cause you to experience things such as faster file copies and reduced storage space. Work has been done to optimize ReFS’s deduplication and compression capabilities. These updates will improve daily interaction with files, as well as enhancing the capabilities of Dev Drive by enabling block cloning.

Compress to…

I can’t tell you how many times I have installed third-party tools such as 7-Zip recently, because the built-in Windows Zip function seems to be a little flaky in recent versions of the Windows operating system. Never fear, I think we have a resolution to this issue beginning in Server 2025. In fact, right-clicking on a file now gives you a new Compress to… option, which allows you to easily compress files out to ZIP, 7-Zip or TAR files with a single click.

SMB over QUIC

Okay, I am very excited about this one! With the release of Windows Server 2022, we learned about this cool new SMB protocol that securely enables SMB traffic (file shares) to natively map directly over the internet using TLS1.3 without needing any kind of VPN connection. This enables mapped network drives to file servers to work directly, but still securely, over the internet. That is incredible! The downside to using SMB over QUIC was that it required you to utilize a special edition of the operating system, Windows Server 2022 Azure Edition. This is no longer a requirement! SMB over QUIC is now built natively into Windows Server 2025 Standard or Datacenter. We will take a closer look at this new file access protocol in Chapter 6, File Management.

OpenSSH

In previous versions of Windows Server, you were required to install a tool manually to use OpenSSH. It is now built into Windows Server 2025, indicating Microsoft expects this to be more widely used moving forward. They have also added a new local group to Windows called OpenSSH Users for easy control over who can or cannot access your devices using OpenSSH.

Windows VPN hardening

Routing and Remote Access Service (RRAS) has been serving up Windows Server-based VPN connectivity for many, many years. Throughout that time, there have been a couple of VPN protocols that have always been enabled options, but those protocols are now considered to be unsafe, compromised, and all-around bad ideas. Namely, I’m talking about PPTP and L2TP, which you will now find disabled by default in Windows Server 2025. They can still be enabled if needed, but Microsoft rightly expects you to now be making use of SSTP or IKEv2 for all Windows-based VPN connectivity.

Azure Arc

While this is not inherently a technology about Windows Server, Azure Arc is a cloud-based server management platform that could certainly interact with all instances of Server 2025 (and more), allowing you to centrally manage even on-prem servers from Azure. Tapping local servers into Azure Arc is as simple as running through a quick wizard in the operating system or by using PowerShell. As Microsoft continues to add new Azure-like features to on-prem versions of Windows Server, we should expect that plugging those servers into Azure Arc will become a routine and necessary action to enable those new functions.

AI-ready

As I was researching interoperability between Windows Server 2025 and AI, I was sick to my stomach to find that many of the articles written about AI are, indeed, written by AI itself. It is still fairly obvious to the human brain at this point. In fact, I found entire websites that seem to have been created by AI. These websites are full of buzzwords and popular phrases, but in the end, they lack any real content. While there are clearly some people tying Server 2025 and AI together in what they are writing, and certainly AI-written articles have decided to self-promote AI (cue end-of-the-world scenarios), this seems to be the reality of where Server 2025 meets AI.

Server 2025 includes some improvements that help this latest operating system to be better ready to service AI workloads, as companies move further and further into this space. GPU partitioning, in particular, allows companies to divide GPUs across multiple applications and services, increasing system performance in a way that is particularly helpful for AI workloads. For example, a single physical GPU can be split among multiple VMs.

Also, NVMe storage boost allows for up to 60% faster IOPS compared to Server 2022, which will significantly enhance data retrieval and processing, integral for large data transactions commonly associated with the AI world.

Feedback Hub

How many times have you seen or experienced something on a Windows machine and thought, “I wish I could report this to Microsoft, but would anybody actually look at it?” We now have a mechanism to do exactly that. Feedback or problems can be reported to Microsoft directly from the Windows Server 2025 interface via Feedback Hub. You can even include screen recordings!

Hyper-converged infrastructure (Azure Local)

I already mentioned Azure Local, formerly known as Azure Stack HCI, in the list of new features Microsoft is offering. If the term Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is new to you, a little backstory may prove beneficial here.

When you see the term HCI, it is important to understand that we are not talking about a specific technology that exists within your server environment. Rather, HCI is a culmination of a number of different technologies that can work together and be managed together, all for the purpose of creating the mentality of a Software-Defined Datacenter (SDDC as it is sometimes referred to).

Specifically, HCI in the Microsoft world is most often referred to as the combination of Hyper-V and Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) on the same cluster of servers. Clustering these services together enables some big speed and reliability benefits over hosting these roles separately and on their own systems. It also creates a tech stack that begins to resemble the way that Azure runs, but within your own physical server infrastructure.

Another component that is part of, or related to, an SDDC is Software-Defined Networking (SDN). Similar to how compute virtualization platforms (such as Hyper-V) completely changed the landscape of what server computing looked like 15 or more years ago, we are now finding ourselves capable of lifting the network layer away from physical hardware and shifting the design and administration of our networks to be virtual and managed by the Windows Server platform.

Where the idea of HCI really takes a leap, as it relates directly to the Windows Server 2025 release, is through integration with Azure Local. Now that we can run private clouds within our datacenter walls, Microsoft has provided us with true cloud capabilities through the use of Windows Server 2025 Datacenter: Azure Edition within that Azure Local environment.

We expect each new operating system release to include new and updated features, but don’t generally think too much about what might be old enough to be removed completely when a new version is released. The removal of old, unnecessary, and insecure code can only be a healthy update for Windows Server. Removing these components in Server 2025 does not mean that Microsoft will not continue to support them on existing servers, but they have no plans to continue developing these technologies in the future. Let’s look at some deprecations for Server 2025.

SAC releases

As we have already discussed, the SAC releases of Windows Server will no longer be built and released. The future of on-premise Windows Server is through the standard LTSC release channel.

Guarded fabric and shielded VMs

Technically, these were already deprecated with Server 2022, but it’s a big enough announcement that we should mention it again. Guarded fabric and shielded VMs were big news in Server 2016, and Microsoft will continue to support customers who use guarded hypervisor fabrics and shielded VMs, but there are no plans for future development of this technology.

IIS6 Management Console and SMTP server

The trusty, rusty, 20-year-old IIS console has been removed, in lieu of the newer IIS management console that has already existed for years. You would think that everyone should already be using the newer console, and this would not have a large impact, but I am continually surprised to find at least a couple of customers every year who are still using IIS6 to relay SMTP mail. Yikes, get away from that thing today!

Wordpad

No real surprise here, I can’t say that I have watched anybody launch Wordpad in more than 10 years. With alternatives such as Word or even Notepad, which has been recently enhanced, this old text editor is now six feet under.

NTLMv1

Hopefully, you won’t notice this change, but this old authentication method has now been removed, and Microsoft hopes you have everything moved over to Kerberos. While NTLMv1 specifically is the only one fully removed in Server 2025, any other flavor of NTLM is also on its way out the door and will no longer be developed by Microsoft. In other words, don’t rely on NTLMv2, as that will also be removed during a future release.

PowerShell 2.0

This engine is now removed. PowerShell 5.0 or higher has been the standard for many years at this point—applications that rely on 2.0 are due for an upgrade!

TLS 1.0 and 1.1

While not fully removed, these old protocols are disabled by default. Any applications still relying on either of these versions of TLS have gray hair at this point and should be upgraded or replaced.

Windows Internal Database (WID)

This one came as a surprise to me! Microsoft has utilized its internal database for many functions over the years. WID is still fully in Windows Server 2025 as it is still utilized by many roles, such as ADFS, IPAM, Remote Desktop, and WSUS. The big news here is that Microsoft is no longer going to develop anything new in WID, and it may be removed in a future release. They are making recommendations that companies who utilize these services start sliding them over to the free (or paid) version of SQL.

Windows Server Update Services (WSUS)

This is another component that still exists in Windows Server 2025 today, but Microsoft has announced no plans to actively develop it in the future. With operating system updates now being steered by new tech such as hotpatching and the update process being managed by Azure Arc or other tools, Microsoft’s own server-side update mechanism is becoming yesterday’s news. Please don’t misunderstand: you can still use WSUS today and can even build a brand new WSUS environment right now in 2025, but this news from Microsoft means you should begin researching alternatives within the next few years.

Let’s jump in the wayback machine for a minute and walk through some graphical interface history. Microsoft Windows users have always known and loved their computers, and a large part of the reason Windows became such a standard in the business world is that the global workforce is familiar with navigating a Windows world. This familiarity has paid unimaginable dividends for Microsoft over the years, but there have been a couple of bumps in the road. Unfortunately, Microsoft turned a lot of people off with the introduction of Windows 8 and Server 2012, not because functionality or reliability was lacking, but because the interface was so vastly different from what it had been before. It was almost like running two separate operating systems at the same time. You had the normal desktop experience, in which all of us spent 99.9% of our time, but then there were also those few moments where you found yourself needing to visit the full-page Start menu. More likely, you stumbled into it without wanting to. However you ended up there, inside that full-screen, tablet-like interface, for the remaining 0.01% of your Server 2012 experience, you were left confused, disturbed, and wishing you were back in the traditional desktop. I am, of course, speaking purely from experience here. There may be variations in your personal percentages of time spent, but based on conversations I was involved in at the time, I am not alone in these views, and I haven’t even mentioned the magical, self-appearing Charms bar. Some bad memories are better left in the recesses of the brain.

The major update of Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2 came with the welcome relief from these symptoms. There was an actual Start button in the corner again, and you could choose to boot primarily into the normal desktop mode. However, should you ever have the need to click on that Start button, you would find yourself right back on the full-page Start screen, which I still found almost all server admins trying their best to avoid at all costs.

Well, it turns out that Microsoft does listen to the people and brought some much-needed relief in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016, and they have not deviated in such a major way since. Whether working on Windows Server 2016, 2019, or 2022, you will experience comfort and stability in the flavor of a Windows 10 look and feel, which finally wiped away the full-screen Start menu and brought balance back to the universe.

Then came Windows 11…

Certainly updated, but not nearly as egregiously as the Windows 8 release, Windows 11 is much more rounded and polished while still maintaining Windows-centric roots. As far as the current server graphical interface goes, Windows Server 2025 receives the same facelift, taking on the interface of Windows 11 workstations. If you are comfortable navigating inside Windows 11, you are already well suited to Windows Server 2025.

For anyone new to working within Windows or just looking for some tips and tricks to get them rolling, this section is for you.

The updated Start menu

All throughout Windows 10 sub-version releases, there were small ongoing changes to the Start menu. Backpedaling from Windows 8, we rediscovered a real Start button that launches a real Start menu—one that doesn’t take over the entire desktop. To be honest, personally, I almost never open the Start menu at all, other than to search for an application or feature that I want. We will cover more on that very soon.

Now that we have moved into the Windows 11 interface, Start menu interoperability is relatively the same as Windows 10, though, as I’m sure you noticed during your first interaction with Windows 11, the Start button and Taskbar icons have moved into the middle of your screen. Why? Nobody has been able to tell me a sure answer to that, but it takes some getting used to.

Other than the arguably annoying slide of the Start button to the middle of the taskbar, the new Start menu is quite useful. Click on that button, and a few nice things stand out:

• Viewing of all applications installed on the server is possible by clicking the All apps button, but we are creatures of habit, and many times, when the Start button is pressed, we are re-visiting an application or task that we have done a hundred times before. Pinning commonly used items to the top of your Start menu can save time and clicks during your daily work.
• Clicking that All apps button lists all applications installed on the server, in alphabetical order. This is very useful for launching an application or for doing a quick check to find out whether a particular app or feature is installed on your server.
• The bottom of the Start menu includes a couple of buttons for quick access to account or system items. Easily and more clearly accessible here than in previous versions is the ability to shut down, restart, or log out of a server.
• Search, the text bar on top of the Start menu, is by far its most useful decoration, as you can simply click the Start button on your keyboard and immediately begin typing the name of any application, setting, or document that you want to launch.

You can see all of these functions in Figure 1.2:

Figure 1.2: The new Start menu

Now that is a breath of fresh air. A simple but useful Start menu, and more importantly, one that loads quickly over remote connections such as RDP or Hyper-V consoles.

The Quick Admin Tasks menu

As nice as it is to have a functional Start menu, as a server administrator, I still very rarely find myself needing to access the traditional menu for my day-to-day functions. This is because many items that I need to access are quickly available to me inside the Quick Admin Tasks menu, which opens by simply right-clicking on the Start button. This menu has been available to us since the release of Windows 8, but many IT professionals still make little use of this functionality.

This menu has become an important part of my interaction with Windows Server operating systems, and hopefully, it will be for you as well. Right-clicking on the Start button shows us immediate quick links to do things such as open Event Viewer, view System properties, check Device Manager, and even shut down or restart the server.

The two most common functions that I call for in this context menu are the Run function and using it to quickly launch a Terminal prompt. Even better is the ability from this menu to open either a regular user context Terminal prompt or an elevated/administrative Terminal prompt. Using this menu properly saves many mouse clicks and shortens troubleshooting time:

Figure 1.3: The Quick Admin Tasks menu

Using the Search function

While the Quick Admin Tasks menu hidden behind the Start button is useful for calling common administrative tasks, using the Search function inside the Start menu is a powerful tool for interfacing with literally anything on Windows Server. Depending on who installed applications and roles on your servers, you may or may not have shortcuts available to launch them inside the Start menu. You also may or may not have desktop shortcuts or links to open these programs from the taskbar. I find that it is often difficult to find specific settings that you are trying to tweak, by point-and-clicking your way through the interface. Control Panel is slowly being replaced by the newer Settings menu in newer versions of Windows, and sometimes this results in the discovery of particular settings being difficult. All of these troubles are alleviated with the search bar inside the Start menu. By simply clicking on the Start button or, even easier, by pressing the Windows key (WinKey) on your keyboard, you can simply start typing the name of whatever program, setting, or document you want to open, and you will see search results from across the entire server.

As a most basic example, press WinKey on your keyboard, then type notepad, and press the Enter key. You will see that good old Notepad opens right up for us. We never had to navigate anywhere in the Programs folder in order to find and open it. In fact, we never even had to touch the mouse, which is music to the ears of someone like me who loves doing everything he possibly can via the keyboard:

Figure 1.4: Windows Search

An even better example is to pick something that would be buried deep inside Settings or Control Panel. How about changing the speed of your mouse? A traditional server admin might open Control Panel (if they can find it), probably navigate to the Hardware or Appearance and Personalization sections, because nothing else looks obviously correct, and still not find what they were looking for. After poking around for a few more minutes, they would start to think that Microsoft forgot to add this setting altogether. But alas, these mouse power settings are simply buried somewhere else, and to be honest, I don’t think Microsoft really expects admins to manually seek things out at this point. We will discuss the new Settings screen momentarily, from which many common settings are being re-grouped into new homes, but ultimately, for the purposes of this example, you are currently stuck at the point where you cannot find the setting you want to change. What’s the quick solution? Press your WinKey to open the Start menu, and type mouse speed. You’ll see in the list of available options showing in the search menu one called Change the mouse pointer display or speed. Click on that and you will have found the setting you were looking for all along:

Figure 1.5: Searching for settings

Any other applications, settings, or even documents on your server that are related to “mouse speed” will also be displayed in your search results. I don’t know of a more powerful way to open applications or settings on Windows Server 2025 than using the search bar inside the Start menu. Give it a try today!

Pinning programs to the taskbar or Start menu

While Windows Server 2025 provides great searching capabilities so that launching hard-to-find applications is very easy, sometimes it’s easier to have quick shortcuts for commonly used items available with a single click down in the traditional taskbar. Alternatively, pin them directly to your Start menu for easy access in the future. Whether you have sought out a particular application by browsing manually through the Start menu or have used the Search function to pull up the program that you want, you can simply right-click on the program and choose Pin to taskbar to stick a permanent shortcut to that application in the taskbar at the bottom of your screen. Once you have done this, during future logins to your session on the server, your favorite and most-used applications will be waiting for you with a single click.

As you can see in Figure 1.6, you also have the ability to pin programs to the Start menu, which of course is another useful place from which to launch them regularly:

Figure 1.6: Pinning programs to the taskbar

Many readers will already be very familiar with the process of pinning programs to the taskbar, so let’s take it one step further to portray an additional function you may not be aware is available to you when you have applications pinned.

The power of right-clicking

We are all familiar with right-clicking in any given area of a Windows operating system in order to use some more advanced functions. Small context menus displayed upon a right-click have existed since the two-button mouse rolled off the assembly line.

We often right-click in order to copy text, copy documents, paste these, or get into a deeper set of properties for a particular file or folder. Many day-to-day tasks are accomplished with that mouse button. What I want to take a minute to point out is that software makers, Microsoft and otherwise, have been adding even more right-click functionality into application launchers themselves, which makes it even more advantageous to have them close at hand, such as inside the taskbar.

The amount of functionality provided to you when right-clicking on an application in the taskbar differs, depending on the application itself. For example, if I were to right-click on Command Prompt, I have options to either open Command Prompt or Unpin from taskbar. Very simple stuff. If I right-click again on the smaller menu option for Command Prompt, I have the ability to perform the same functions, but I could also get further into Properties or Run as administrator. So, I get a little more enhanced functionality the deeper I go:

Figure 1.7: Right-click to find Run as administrator

With other programs, you may find even more results. And the more you utilize your servers, the more data and options you will start to see in these right-click context menus. Two great examples are Notepad and Remote Desktop Client. On my server, I have worked on a few text configuration files, and I have used my server to jump into other servers to perform some remote tasks. I have done this using the Remote Desktop client. Now, when I right-click on Notepad as listed in my taskbar, I have quick links to the most recent documents that I have worked on:

Figure 1.8: Right-clicking reveals recent documents

When right-clicking on my RDP icon, I now have quick links listed right here for the recent servers that I have connected to. I don’t know about you, but I RDP into a lot of different servers on a daily basis. Having a link for the Remote Desktop client in the taskbar, automatically keeping track of the most recent servers I have visited, definitely saves me time and mouse clicks as I work through my daily tasks:

Figure 1.9: Recent RDP connections

These right-click functions have existed for a couple of operating system versions now, so it’s not new technology, but it is being expanded upon regularly as new versions of applications are released. It is also a functionality that I don’t witness many server administrators utilizing, but perhaps they should start doing so in order to work more efficiently, which is why we are discussing it here.

Something that is enhanced in the Windows 11 and Server 2025 platforms that is also very useful on a day-to-day basis is the Quick access view, which is presented by default when you open File Explorer. We all know and use File Explorer and have for a long time, but typically, when you want to get to a particular place on a hard drive or to a specific file, you have many mouse clicks to go through in order to reach your destination. Windows Server 2025’s Quick access view immediately shows us both recently and frequently opened files and folders that we commonly access from the server. We, as admins, often have to visit the same places on the hard drive and open the same files time and time again. Wouldn’t it be great if File Explorer lumped all those common locations and file links in one place? That is exactly what Quick access does.

You can see in the following screenshot that opening File Explorer gives you quick links to open both frequently accessed folders as well as links to your recent files. A feature like this can be a real time-saver, and regularly making use of these little bits and pieces available to you, in order to increase your efficiency, demonstrates to colleagues and those around you that you have a real familiarity and comfort level with this latest round of operating systems:

Figure 1.10: Quick access

You’ll also notice the small pushpin icons next to some of those Quick access locations. You can easily right-click on any folder location via File Explorer and choose Pin to Quick access, adding it to your Quick access menu, and Windows will maintain that pinned location right here inside the Quick access section until you choose to unpin it.

App snapping

Some of you may be familiar with add-ins to Windows called PowerTools, one of which allows you to easily carve out segments of your screen for different applications. When running multiple windows or applications onscreen at the same time, PowerTools allows an easy way to “snap” applications to a certain size or section of the screen, without any manual click-and-drag resizing of windows. Microsoft has baked some of this capability directly into Windows 11, and now that we are running the Win11 interface inside Windows Server 2025, application snapping is natively included in this newest server operating system as well. To be clear, PowerTools still offers other cool functions, but app snapping that we are discussing here is now a native capability and will work out of the box in Server 2025.

App snapping is quite intuitive, and you won’t need a lot of instruction to make use of it, but it’s good to know that there are three different ways you can call it to action:

• Drag a window to the top-center of your screen and hold it there
• Hover your mouse over the top of any window’s maximize button
• Use WinKey + Z

Invoking any of the preceding three procedures will display a nice little bar, which provides you with tons of different options about where and how you would like to position this window. Take a look at the following screenshot, where I have hovered my mouse over the top of the maximize button in a File Explorer window.

Figure 1.11: App snapping in action

As you can see, simply selecting one of the available screen zones will immediately snap this File Explorer window into that size and shape. My mouse is currently hovering over the option you see in blue, which would place File Explorer in the far-left, third section of my screen. When selecting a zone that includes other gray-colored zones, Windows will snap your application into that position, and then immediately ask you what application you would like to place in the other remaining open sections of the screen. I use this functionality all the time when repositioning windows on my workstation—why not on servers?

App snapping is fairly intuitive. As you can see in Figure 1.11, the top three options for File Explorer positioning have automatically given me options that will auto-position the other apps I currently have open on this server. Those apps are Server Manager and the Hyper-V Manager console, which are easily identifiable by their icons. Selecting one of those top options will immediately place File Explorer on the left, with the other applications displayed alongside it toward the right. In Figure 1.12, you can see that I selected the upper-right option, which laid File Explorer alongside both of the other open applications.

Figure 1.12: After snapping

One more tip related to this topic: If you know me at all, you know that I touch the mouse as little as possible, trying my best to live in a keyboard-only world. Your open applications and windows can also be snapped around your screen(s) with zero mouse interaction at all, by employing the following hotkeys:

• WinKey + Left Arrow: Snap the active window to the left half of your current screen
• WinKey + Right Arrow: Snap the active window to the right half of your current screen
• WinKey + Up Arrow: Maximize the current window
• WinKey + Down Arrow: Minimize the current window
• WinKey + M: Minimize all open windows, which is pretty useful

When using multiple monitors, use these hotkeys:

• WinKey + Shift + Left: Move the current window to the next monitor on your left
• WinKey + Shift + Right: Move the current window to the next monitor on your right

That may seem like a lot of keyboard functions to keep in the human memory banks, but they will become muscle memory in no time. Trust me, the time savings are worth it!

If you work in IT and have used Windows 10 on a client machine for any period of time, it’s a sure bet that you have already worked within the newer Settings interface. Settings in Windows Server 2025 is just what the name implies, an interface from which you configure various settings within the operating system.

What can sometimes be difficult or confusing about the existence of Settings is that we also have a different landing platform for settings contained inside Windows that has been around for a zillion years. It’s called Control Panel.

The Settings menu inside Windows isn’t a brand-new idea, but it looks and feels quite new when compared to Control Panel. Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 had a quasi-presence of this newer Settings screen that, as far as I know, went largely unused by systems administrators. I believe that to be the effect of poor execution, as the Settings menu in 2012 was accessed and hidden behind the Charms bar, which most folks have decided was a terrible idea. We will not spend too much time on technology of the past, but the Charms bar in Server 2012 is a little bit like an AMC Pacer in the car world. You may have never even heard of it, or you may be old enough to have had the unfortunate experience of owning one yourself, and it is now irrevocably part of your own story. The Charms bar was a menu that presented itself when you swiped your finger in from the right edge of the screen. What’s that, you ask? Servers don’t usually have touchscreens? I’m right there with you—not any that I have ever worked on, anyway. So, the Charms bar was also presented when you hovered the mouse up near the top right of the screen. It was quite difficult to access, yet it seemed to always appear whenever you didn’t want it to, such as when you were trying to click on something on the right side of the screen, and instead you clicked on something inside the Charms bar that suddenly popped out of nowhere.

I am only giving you this background information in order to segue into this next idea. Much of the user interface in Windows 10+, and therefore Windows Server 2016+, can be considered a small step backward from the realm of finger swipes and touchscreens. Windows 8 and Server 2012 were so focused on big app buttons and finger swipes that a lot of people got lost in the shuffle. It was so different from what we had ever seen before and difficult to use at an administrative level. Because of feedback received from that release, the graphical interface and user controls, including both the Start menu and the Settings menu in Windows Server 2025, are sort of smack-dab in the middle between Server 2008 and Server 2012. This backward step was the right one to take, and I have heard nothing but praise so far for the newer user interfaces.

So, getting back to the Settings menu, if you click on your Start button, then click on that little gear labeled Settings, you will see this new interface:

Figure 1.13: Windows Settings

There are many settings and pieces of the operating system that you can configure in this new Settings menu. Some settings in Windows now only exist in this interface, but many can still be accessed either here or through the traditional Control Panel. The goal seems to be a shift toward all configurations being done through the new menu in future releases, but, for now, we can still administer most setting changes through our traditional methods if we so choose. I mentioned Windows Update earlier, and that is a good example to look over. Historically, we would configure our Windows Update settings via Control Panel, but they have now been completely migrated over to the new Settings menu in Windows Server 2025. Search Control Panel for Windows Update, and the only result is that you can view currently installed updates. But, if you search the new Settings menu for Windows Update, you’ll find it right away.

Remember, you can always use the Windows search feature to look for any setting! Hit your WinKey and type Windows Update, and you’ll be given quick links that take you straight into the appropriate Settings menus.

For the moment, you will have to use a combination of Control Panel and the Settings menu to do your work. This gets confusing occasionally. With each new release of the Windows operating system, Microsoft moves more and more functions directly into Settings, lessening the requirements on Control Panel. As an example, even in Windows Server 2022, if you wanted to change a NIC’s IP address, you would always need to visit one of the older configuration screens. You could view NIC settings inside the Settings console, but clicking the button to edit the IP address of a network card would then launch the older Network Connections screen. While Network Connections still exists and you can certainly still use it to edit NIC configurations, for the first time in the history of Windows Server, you can now change your IP address directly from inside the Settings interface!

Go ahead and try it out. Launch the Settings menu and navigate to Network & internet. Then click Ethernet in the right column. Scrolling down a little bit, you will find your IP assignment displayed, alongside a button called Edit. Previously, selecting the option here to edit an IP address would immediately launch a separate window to the old-style Control Panel screens, but as of today, we have the ability to edit our IP address right here inside Settings!

Figure 1.14: Editing IP address inside Settings

While Microsoft continues to move Windows configuration items into the Settings console, don’t be surprised if you still run across some items that take you back to those classic Control Panel screens. They still exist, even if they are starting to collect dust on the shelf.

Two ways to do the same thing

Potentially confusing as well, until you get used to navigating around in here, is that you can sometimes accomplish the same task in either Control Panel or the Settings menu, but the process that you take in each interface can have a vastly different look and feel. Let’s take a look at that firsthand by trying to create a new user account on our server, once via Control Panel, and again via Settings.

Creating a new user through Control Panel

You are probably familiar with this. Open Control Panel and click on User Accounts. Then, click on the User Accounts heading. Now, click on the Manage another account link. Inside this screen is the Add a user account option. Click on that and you get the dialog box where you enter a username and password for your new user:

Figure 1.15: Adding a user account via Control Panel

Creating a new user through the Settings menu

Let’s take this newer Settings interface for a test drive. Open the Settings menu and click on Accounts. Now, click on Other users in the right column. There is an Add account button here; go ahead and click on that:

Figure 1.16: Adding a user account via Settings

What in the world is that? Not what I expected, unfortunately. To my surprise, the old Control Panel user account launches a nice, fresh-looking interface from which I can create new user accounts. Accessing user accounts via the newer Settings console launches me into the old Local Users and Groups manager. Technically, from here, I could go ahead and create new user accounts, but it seems like there is some sort of a disconnect here. You would naturally think that the new Settings would initiate the newer, nicer screen to add new user accounts, but we found the opposite to be true.

We walked through this simple example of attempting to perform the same function through two different interfaces to showcase that there are some items that can, and must, be performed within the new Settings menu context, but there are many functions within Windows that still need to be accomplished through our traditional interfaces. While Control Panel continues to exist, and probably will for a very long time, you should start navigating your way around the Settings menu and figure out what is available inside, so that you can start to shape your ideas for the best combination of both worlds in order to manage your servers effectively.

Just one last thing to point out as we start getting comfortable with the way that the new Settings menu looks: many of the settings that we configure in our servers are on/off types of settings. By that I mean we are setting something to either one option or another. Historically, these kinds of configurations were handled by either drop-down menus or radio buttons. That is normal; that is expected; that is Windows. Now, you will start to see little swipe bars, or sliders, that allow you to switch settings on or off, like a light switch. Anyone who has used the settings interface of any smartphone knows exactly what I am talking about. This user interface behavior has now made its way into the full Windows operating systems and is probably here to stay. Just to give you an idea of what it looks like in the context of the new Settings menu, here is a screenshot of the current Windows Update -> Advanced options settings page.

This is a good example of those on/off slider buttons:

Figure 1.17: Windows Update | Advanced options

Let’s explore the Task Manager tool next.

Task Manager is a tool that has existed in all Windows operating systems since the first days of the graphical interface, but it has evolved quite a bit over the years. This tool is essential for troubleshooting problems happening inside Windows, and for terminating applications or processes that seem to be “stuck.” One of the goals of Windows Server 2025 is to be even more useful and reliable than any previous version of Windows Server has been. So, it only makes sense that we finally remove Task Manager altogether, since it simply won’t be needed anymore, right?

I’m kidding, of course! While Server 2025 will hopefully prove itself to indeed be the most stable and least needy operating system we have ever seen from Microsoft, Task Manager still exists and will still be needed by server administrators everywhere. If you haven’t taken a close look at Task Manager in a while, it has changed significantly over the past few releases. Now that we have adopted the Windows 11 GUI, along with it comes a brand-new Task Manager.

Task Manager is still typically invoked by either hitting Ctrl + Alt + Del on your keyboard and then clicking on Task Manager, or by right-clicking on the taskbar and then choosing Task Manager. You can also launch Task Manager with the key combination Ctrl + Shift + Esc or by typing taskmgr inside the Run or Search dialog boxes. If you have already worked with Windows Server 2022, you’ll notice a change right away. Previously, a miniature version of Task Manager was displayed by default—only a simple list of applications that were currently running. This was a useful interface for forcing an application to close that may be hung up, but not for much else, and my guess is that 99% of Task Manager launches were immediately followed by a click on the More details link. That miniature instance of Task Manager is gone, and launching Task Manager via any method will get you to the full toolset.

We immediately notice that the displayed information is more user-friendly than in previous years, with both Apps and Background processes being categorized in a more intuitive way and multiple instances of the same application being condensed down for easy viewing. This gives a faster overhead view of what is going on with our system, while still giving us the ability to expand each application or process to see what individual components or windows are running within the application, such as in Figure 1.18:

Figure 1.18: Task Manager: Processes

Make sure to check out the other sections available inside Task Manager as well, listed on the left-hand side. Users will show us a list of currently logged-in users and the amount of hardware resources that their user sessions are consuming. This is a nice way to identify on a Remote Desktop Session Host server, for example, an individual who might be causing a slowdown on the server. The Details tab is a little bit more of a traditional view of the Processes tab, splitting up much of the same information but in the older style that we were used to seeing in versions of the operating system long ago. Then, the Services tab is pretty self-explanatory; it shows you the Windows services currently installed on the server, their statuses, and offers the ability to start or stop these services as needed, without having to open the Services console separately. Startup apps is a quick way to see what applications are configured to start when the operating system starts, and you can easily enable or disable that from happening per application.

Anyone who has been using Windows 11 for a while may already have experience with another section of this new Task Manager, called App history. Previously, Task Manager was only focused on real-time data. While certainly useful for live troubleshooting and the fixing of problems that are happening right now, historical data is always part of troubleshooting methodology. We now have some historical data right here inside Task Manager! This instance of Windows Server 2025 that I am using has not been running for very long, and so the App history screen is quite boring at the moment. However, if I open the same window on my Windows 11 workstation that I have been using for a while, we’ll see a good representation of the useful information this tool is going to present.

Figure 1.19: Task Manager: App history

The section of Task Manager that I skipped over so that I could mention it more specifically next is the Performance tab. This is a pretty powerful one. Inside, you can quickly monitor CPU, memory, and Ethernet utilization. As you can see in the following screenshot, I haven’t done a very good job of planning resources on this particular virtual machine, as my CPU is hardly being touched but I am almost out of system memory:

Figure 1.20: Task Manager: Performance

Another useful piece of information available inside this screen is server uptime, and I visit Task Manager often for exactly this reason. Discovering the amount of time that a server has been running without a restart can be critical when troubleshooting an issue, and I watch admins time and time again calculating system uptime based on log timestamps. Using Task Manager is a much easier way to find that information!

If you are interested in viewing more in-depth data about server performance, there is another application in Windows called Resource Monitor. In fact, two other technologies provided inside Windows Server 2025 are useful for monitoring system status, particularly for hardware performance: Resource Monitor and Performance Monitor. Open up these tools and start testing them out, as they can provide both troubleshooting information and essential baseline data when you spin up a new server. This baseline can then be compared against future testing data so that you can monitor how new applications or services installed on a particular server have affected their resource consumption. We will discuss these additional monitoring tools in Chapter 17, Troubleshooting.

Moving back to Task Manager, there is just one other little neat trick I would like to test. Still inside the Performance tab, go ahead and right-click on any particular piece of data that you are interested in. I will right-click on the CPU information near the left side of the window. This opens up a dialog box with a few options, of which I am going to click on Summary view. This condenses the data that was previously taking up about half of my screen real estate into a tiny little window, which I can move to the corner of my screen. This is a nice way to always keep hardware utilization data on the screen as you navigate through and work on your server, so that you can watch for any spikes or increases in resource consumption when making changes to the system:

Figure 1.21: Task Manager: Summary Resources

Now let’s check out an often-underutilized function called Task View!

Task View is a sweet feature that first appeared in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 and continues to carry over into Server 2025. It is a similar idea to that of holding down the Alt key and then pressing Tab in order to cycle through the applications that you currently have running. For anyone who has never tried that, go ahead and hold down those two keys on your keyboard right now. Depending on what version of Windows you are running, your screen might look slightly different from this, but in effect, it’s the same information. You can see all of the programs you currently have open, and you can cycle through them from left to right using additional presses of the Tab button. Alternatively, use Alt + Shift + Tab in order to cycle through them in reverse order. When you have many windows open, it is perhaps easier to simply use the mouse to jump to any specific window:

Figure 1.22: Alt + Tab to shuffle between open windows

Task View is quite a bit more powerful than this, because it adds the capability of managing multiple full desktops’ worth of windows and applications. For example, if you were working on two different projects on the same server, and each project required you to have many different windows open at the same time, you would start to burn a lot of time switching back and forth between all of your different apps and windows in order to find what you were looking for. Using Task View, you could leave all of your open windows for the first project on your first desktop, and open all of the windows dealing with the second project on a second desktop. Then, with two clicks, you could easily switch back and forth between the different desktops, using the Task View button. By default, Task View is the little button down in the taskbar, immediately to the right of the search bar. Go ahead and click on it now—it looks like this:

Figure 1.23: The Task View button

You’ll now see a listing of your currently open windows; this looks very similar to the Alt + Tab functionality we looked at earlier. The primary difference is the option called out in Figure 1.23, which gives you the option to create a new desktop. Go ahead and click on that, and you will now discover that clicks on the Task View button show that you are running two separate desktops, Desktop 1 and Desktop 2. Flip back and forth between the two desktops, and you will find that you can run completely separate applications between the two desktop views. In Figure 1.24, you can tell that I have different things open on Desktop 1 than I do on Desktop 2, and switching between these two desktops is very fast and easy. You can even drag and drop existing windows between different desktops, right on this Task View screen:

Figure 1.24: Navigating multiple desktops

Task View is a great way to stay organized and efficient by utilizing multiple desktops on the same server. I suppose it is kind of like running dual monitors, or three, four, or more, all from a single physical monitor screen.

If you want to avoid having to click on the icon for Task View, pressing WinKey + Tab on your keyboard does the same thing!

This first chapter on Windows Server 2025 was an exploration of what it means to be a server and to discover what new features and functions Microsoft has gifted us this year. We also spent time gaining familiarity and comfort navigating around the interface. There are various ways to interact with Server 2025, and we will discuss many of them throughout this book, but most server administrators will interface with this new operating system through the full graphical interface, using both the mouse and keyboard to perform their tasks. If you have worked with previous versions of the Windows Server operating system, then a lot of the tools that you will use to drive this new platform will be the same, or at least similar, to the ones that you have used in the past. New operating systems should always be an evolution of their predecessors, and never entirely new. I think this was a lesson learned with the release of Windows 8 and Server 2012.

With Server 2025, we find a great compromise between the traditional familiarity of the prior versions of Windows and the new benefits that come with rounded edges and touch-friendly screens, which will be used more and more often as we move toward the future of Windows-based devices. In the next chapter, we’ll start putting rubber to the road as we install and begin managing Windows Server 2025.

Put your knowledge to the test with the following questions. If you need a hand (or just want to double-check), you’ll find all the answers in the Appendix section of the book.

1. In Windows Server 2025, how can you launch an elevated Terminal prompt with two mouse clicks?
2. What is the keyboard combination to open the Quick Admin Tasks menu?
3. What is the name of Microsoft’s cloud service offering?
4. Which Windows Server release model has disappeared with the advent of Windows Server 2022?
5. How many virtual machines can run on top of a Windows Server 2025 Standard host, with default licensing?
6. What installation option for Windows Server 2025 does not have a graphical user interface?
7. Which is the correct verbiage for the latest release of Windows Server 2025, Long-Term Servicing Branch (LTSB) or Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC)?
8. What is the correct tool from which to change configurations on Windows Server 2025, Windows Settings or Control Panel?
9. What key combination can be used to launch Task View without touching your mouse?

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