Buckle up admins – Windows Server 2025 officially hits GA

Windows Server 2025 is officially generally available with some substantial changes for administrators including useful Active Directory Domain tweaks, plus the disappearance of some familiar friends including Wordpad.

The successor to Windows Server 2022 – which is available in Standard, Datacenter, and Datacenter:Azure editions – was rebranded as Windows Server 2025 in January 2025. Prior to this it was referred to as Windows Server vNext. For those who aren't yet on Server 2022, it is also possible to upgrade to '2025 from versions as far back as Windows Server 2012 R2.

In the "new features" column are enhancements to Active Directory Domain Services, including a bump to a 32k database page size – up from the 8k page size of the Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) database introduced in Windows 2000 – which will ease some Active Directory scalability restrictions.

Other changes include updates to networking, including Software Defined Networking (SDN) alterations, beefed ...