Windows Server 2025: Heads up for Site24x7 users

Microsoft has officially released Windows Server 2025 for general availability in early November, 2024. While this update has been expected for a long time, we want to cover the five major changes that have been rolled out with this release. Before we start with the features, let's start with two important questions that need to be addressed.

Yes. Our server monitoring agents work on Windows Server 2025.

Instead of theories, let us start with facts and events. A lot of sysadmins and business decision-makers have disabled the automatic upgrade of operating systems for their systems. This is because before any major upgrade is done on your IT infrastructure, you need to know whether your devices are compatible for the upgrade and the dependencies. 

Many endpoint management systems considered the Windows Server 2025 OS upgrade as a security upgrade and automatically updated the operating systems to 2025. The problem was that the licenses for Windows Server 2025 were not yet procured yet. This meant potentially thousands of servers upgraded to Windows Server 2025 were online and fully healthy, but were unavailable to use because of a lack of appropriate licenses. 

This is one of the many reasons why you should be aware of any operating system upgrades. Now that we have explained the important background, here are the top five features rolled out with this Server 2025 upgrade.

Earlier versions of the Windows server operating system required manual installation of OpenSSH connectivity tool. With Windows Server OS 2025, OpenSSH is part of the out-of-the-box package. To authorize the users accessing your servers, you can add them to the OpenSSH Users Group. For better management, the server manager interface comes with a single-click option to enable or disable OpenSSH service (sshd.exe). 

When you work with multiple servers, you may have to move files, logs, and data among servers after compression. With Server OS 2025, Microsoft has added a one-click "Compress to" option where you can compress any file or folder to ZIP, 7z, or TAR compression formats. Each compression format comes with its own compression method.

With Windows Server OS 2025, SMB encryption can be made mandatory for all outbound SMB client connections. Server administrators can now mandate that all destination servers should contain SMB 3 series encryption, making it impossible for servers without this encryption to be unavailable for client access. The SMB authentication rate limiter now controls the number of authentication attempts within a time frame. This prevents brute force attacks.

When you had previously moved a container from Windows to another environment or device, Windows users would face a lot of issues with portability. With Server OS 2025, Microsoft has enhanced the process of moving container images and the associated data among different environments and systems. Now, Windows Server OS 2025 users can create a container image in one host and deploy it on another host, without any compatibility issues.

Linux server administrators used to install packages and their dependencies easily with package managers like the apt command. While Windows has Winget to do the same, it was not pre-installed and had to be manually installed by administrators. With Windows Server Operating System 2025, Winget comes pre-installed, so you can now use this command line package manager for installing applications on Windows servers.

With Microsoft's latest Server OS 2025, Windows servers are now slowly closing the pitfalls that worked against them when compared against Linux servers. OpenSSH, command-line package manager, container portability—these all point towards one direction: Windows server OS is now aimed at better compatibility with other operating systems. With Site24x7, bring your entire IT infrastructure under eagle eyes and never encounter performance degradation.