#Compare Windows Server 2025 Standard and Datacenter

[allaboutkeyingo]

Windows Server 2025 Standard vs Datacenter 

The Standard and Datacenter editions of Windows Server 2025 differ significantly in features, virtualization support, and pricing. Here are the mainly differences:

1. Virtualization Support

Windows Server 2025 Standard: Each license allows 2 virtual machines (VMs) plus 1 Hyper-V host.

Windows Server 2025 Datacenter: Provides unlimited virtual machines, making it ideal for large-scale virtualization environments.

2. Container Support

Windows Server 2025 Standard: Supports unlimited Windows containers but is limited to 2 Hyper-V containers.

Windows Server 2025 Datacenter: Supports unlimited Windows containers and Hyper-V containers.

3. Storage Features

Windows Server 2025 Standard:

Storage Replica is limited to 1 partnership and 1 volume (up to 2TB).

Does not support Storage Spaces Direct.

Windows Server 2025 Datacenter:

Unlimited Storage Replica partnerships.

Supports Storage Spaces Direct, enabling hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI).

4. Advanced Features

Windows Server 2025 Standard:

No support for Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Network Controller, or Shielded VMs.

No Host Guardian Hyper-V Support.

Windows Server 2025 Datacenter:

Supports SDN, Network Controller, and Shielded VMs, enhancing security and management.

Supports GPU partitioning, useful for AI/GPU-intensive workloads.

5. Pricing

Windows Server 2025 Standard:  

$80.00 (includes 16 core ) at keyingo.com.

Windows Server 2025 Datacenter :

$90.00  (includes 16 core ) at keyingo.com.

Summary:

Windows Server 2025 Standard: Best for small businesses or physical server deployments with low virtualization needs.

Windows Server 2025 Datacenter: Designed for large-scale virtualization, hyper-converged infrastructure, and high-security environments, such as cloud providers and enterprise data centers.

[henrietta911]

What's new in Windows Server 2025

This article describes some of the newest developments in Windows Server 2025, which boasts advanced features that improve security, performance, and flexibility. With faster storage options and the ability to integrate with hybrid cloud environments, managing your infrastructure is now more streamlined. Windows Server 2025 builds on the strong foundation of its predecessor while introducing a range of innovative enhancements to adapt to your needs.

If you want to try the Windows Server 2025 now, you can get it from the Microsoft partner store Keyingo.com

The next version of Windows Server will shake up several longstanding practices with the server OS that admins will want to know before its release date.

Windows Server 2025, which will most likely reach general availability during the Microsoft Ignite 2024 show in November, should be largely familiar to admins who have worked with earlier Windows Server versions. But some aspects of the new server OS will be quite distinctive compared to prior Windows Server versions.

What's new

The following new features are specific to Windows Server with Desktop Experience only. Having both the physical devices running the operating system and the correct drivers readily available are required.

Changes to Windows Server licensing

One big adjustment for organizations that rely on Windows Server is Microsoft's plan to introduce a subscription-based, pay-as-you-go licensing model. Contrary to some rumors, Microsoft is not forcing all Windows Server customers into the subscription plan.

Microsoft plans to keep the perpetual license model, which provides five years of mainstream support followed by five years of extended support. With Windows Server 2025, Microsoft will offer a subscription model for organizations that need flexibility.

For example, if an organization hosts an e-commerce application that sees a major demand spike around the holidays, then it could use Windows Server 2025 with a pay-as-you-go license to roll out temporary servers to handle this period of peak activity. This approach gives the business a more affordable option to cope with these seasonal surges without making a major investment for resources needed for part of the year.

Enterprises that wish to use the new pay-as-you-go licensing for Windows Server 2025 must use Azure Arc -- a cross-platform management tool for enterprise workloads -- and the related charges will be billed through Azure.

Hotpatching coming to all Windows Server 2025 editions

Hotpatching is currently available in Windows Server 2022 Datacenter: Azure Edition, but Microsoft plans to add this feature to the Standard and Datacenter editions of Windows Server 2025.

Storage improvements in Windows Server 2025

Windows Server 2025 will use non-volatile memory express (NVMe) storage. Microsoft claimed customers will see a 70% increase in IOPS when using Windows Server 2025 with NVMe storage.

Windows Server 2025 will support NVMe over Fabrics for faster data transfer speeds

a storage protocol that uses Transport Layer Security 1.3 to encrypt SMB trafficwill be  available in Windows Serve 2025 Standard, Datacenter and Azure editions.

Changes to Hyper-V

Generation 2 VMs will replace generation 1 VMs as the default choice when creating new VMs

Windows Server 2025 is dynamic processor compatibility. With current versions of Windows Server, a live migration of VMs between two Hyper-V hosts requires using servers with identical CPUs or enabling processor compatibility mode, which makes CPUs function at the most basic level

Microsoft plans to debut GPU partitioning (GPU-P) support, which gives the user a way to employ the processing power of the server's GPU and share it among multiple VMs.

Support for Microsoft 365 Apps

Windows Server 2025 will support Microsoft 365 Apps until the end of the five-year mainstream period.

Email & accounts

You can now add the following accounts in Settings > Accounts > Email & accounts for Windows Server 2025: Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft account and Work or school account

File Compression

Windows Server 2025 has a new compression feature when compressing an item by performing a right-click called Compress to. This feature supports ZIP, 7z, and TAR compression formats with specific compression methods for each.

[henrietta911]

What's the difference between Windows server 2025 and Windows Server 2022

Windows Server 2025 download is available on the archive, and if you need the Windows server 2025 Product key and Server 2025 Cals , you can get it from the Microsoft partner store keyingo.com

There are key improvements in Windows Server 2025 in the following areas:

Hotpatching – rebootless patches

Active Directory – new scalability, domain and forest functional levels

Storage – Faster NVMe, new features added

Clusters and Hyper-V – Workgroup clusters, configuration maximums in Hyper-V

Networking – New Network HUD, multisite SDN, and more

Containers – Smaller containers, decoupled host and container updates

File Services with SMB Over QUIC & Security – QUIC now in Standard and Datacenter

Modern Server Experience – Winget, OS upgrades through Windows Updates

1. Hotpatching

It allows you to install security patches without a reboot. Every patch Tuesday patches are released. Hotpatching allows applying those patches without a reboot. It modifies the in-memory code and the server processes don’t have to be restarted.

Hotpatching was released in Azure Edition of Windows Server 2022. However, Windows Server 2025 brings to the realm of any type of infrastructure (Hyper-V on-premises, VMware, physical hardware, etc). Through Arc-enablement you can enable hotpatching as a monthly subscription.

XBOX is currently making use of this new rebootless technology with patching in their services.

2. Active Directory

Compared to Windows Server 2002, Active Directory is much more scalable with 32K page size. Before it was 8K pages. Now with Windows Server 2025 and 35K pages, it significantly enhances the amount of data that can be stored and the scalability of Active Directory in general. It will require the new functional level update (forest and domain levels)

3. Optimized NVMe storage enhancements

Microsoft mentions that just by upgrading to Windows Server 2025 you get 70% faster NVMe performance. Windows Server 2025 dramatically enhances the performance of data-intensive applications.

This helps with lower latency and higher throughput for applications and helps remove any bottleneck to performance from the storage layer.

Microsoft has also folded in a lot of other advancements that have come about on the storage front from Azure as they do with many of the LTSC releases. Those improvements include:

Storage Replica – performance enhancements and enhanced log, SR compression

ReFS – Optimized dedup and compression for active workloads like virtual machines

Storage Spaces – Thinly provisioned storage spaces and stretched cluster support

4. Clusters and Hyper-V

Compared with Windows Server 2002, there are many improvements for clustering and failover clustering. Now cluster-aware updating has many enhancements including:

Reliability and performance improvements

You can now upgrade to Windows Server 2025 from Windows Server 2022 without downtime. In the same fashion you apply new versions of Windows 11 it will run the update to newer versions of the OS. Windows Server 2025 will do the same thing.

Workgroup clusters (no domain join) – cert-based VM live migration now works without domain join

GPU-P VM live migration on a failover cluster

Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) stretch clusters between two sites

Improved storage replica (SR) performance

Hyper-V’s role in Windows Server 2025 is more powerful than ever. It has many enhancements in this release. The introduction of improved GPU partitioning capabilities allows for more efficient allocation of graphics processing resources among virtual machines. It is a feature particularly beneficial for applications requiring intensive graphical processing or machine learning tasks.

Microsoft touts that Hyper-V is everywhere and they are using across many technologies:

Azure

Azure Stack Family

Windows Server/ Windows

Containers with Hyper-V isolation

Platform security

Xbox

Dynamic processor compatibilities in Windows Server 2025 has been significantly improved. It is much more granular and looks at the capabilities between the processors and reducing the capabilities to match the processors.

Furthermore, there is greatly increased scalability with Hyper-V, It now supports up to 248 virtual processors and 240 terabytes of RAM, prepare Hyper-V. These features, coupled with the refined dynamic processor compatibility, make sure Hyper-V is a modern solution capable of handling anything you want to throw at it.

To take advantage of these new features, use Gen 2 VMs and UEFI BIOS.

5. Networking

There are many advancements coming in networking in Windows Server 2025 vs Windows Server 2022.

Network ATC one-click deployment and drift remediation

Network HUD – “heads up” display for networking

SDN Multisite – multisite for stretched cluster of SDN

SDN Gateway Performance Improvements

Modern AKS applications

6. Containers

Windows Server 2025 container support has been enhanced and is more flexible than Windows Server 2022. Host upgrades have been decoupled from container upgrades, making lifecycle management much more flexible for Microsoft Windows containers.

Performance has been improved along with image size reductions for containers. There is also improved application compatibility with Nano server with Features on Demand.

7. File Services with SMB Over QUIC & Security

SMB over QUIC is a huge improvement for remote file access technology. It enables encrypted file access over the internet without the need for a VPN. Windows Server 2025 addresses a critical need for more flexible and secure remote work solutions.

Features include:

SMB for telecommuters, mobile devices, cloud

No VPN required

Runs over standard port 443

Encryption is always on

Authenticated with TLS 1.3

Available in non-Azure versions, including Standard and Datacenter

It makes for new possibilities in how organizations manage remote access to their data. You can now offer a solution that is both highly secure and user-friendly. SMB over QUIC used to be only available with Windows Server Azure Edition. However, SMB over Quick has been brought into all editions of Windows Server 2025 (Standard and Datacenter) so that organizations of all sizes can benefit. These are only available in Windows Server 2022 Azure edition.

File services security improvements

There are many great security improvements, including:

SMB Signing – required by default and stop relay and attacker-in-the-middle, phishing

Auth Rate Limiter – throttle bad NTLM passwords by default

SMB Firewall rule hardening – No longer opens NETBIOS ports by default

SMB NTLM Disable Option – Granular control of NTLM from remote

SMB Dialect Control – Allow or refuse SMB 2 or SMB 3

8. Modern Server Experience

Winget is one of the coolest new tools that provides a “store-like” experience for Windows Server that is contained by default in Windows Server 2025 vs Windows Server 2022. Like we have been able to do with windows client machines running Windows 10 and 11, you can use winget to install tools and other utilities you need, including PowerShell.

You can easily install tools like Sysinternals (Process Monitor, Process Explorer, TCPmon, etc). You can even install apps like Microsoft SQL Server using winget. Also, there is OS Upgrades through Windows Updates and this is controllable through Group Policy.

Other miscellaneous modern server features

Arc integration wizards built-in

Wi-Fi support and Bluetooth support

Windows Server with Desktop Experience

New Subscription-based purchasing model.

Subscription model like Azure Stack HCI and SQL Server 2022

Conclusion

Windows Server 2025 is a great new operating system from Microsoft that includes all of the latest technologies and features that Microsoft has been previewing in Microsoft Azure for the last while. There are great new things in Windows Server 2025 compared with Windows Server 2022. It includes things like Hotpatching, new Active Directory scalability and performance improvements, including a new domain and forest functional level, new storage features, including NVMe performance improvements, networking enhancements, better container support and efficiencies, SMB over QUIC, and a modern Windows Server experience with tools like winget, OS upgrades through Windows Updates and others.