Microsoft Windows Server 2025 Licences

Optimise your business with Windows Server 2025: advanced performance and 100% genuine licence at Mr Key Shop. Save money with digital distribution and bring Microsoft innovation to your IT infrastructure.

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Frequently Asked Questions from Customers

Windows Server 2025 is the new version of Microsoft's server operating system and is officially available from 1 November 2024. This is the date of General Availability (GA), i.e. the moment when the product left the preview/Insider phase and became available for purchase and use in production.

To install Windows Server 2025, your system must meet certain minimum hardware requirements, which are designed for installation and testing environments, not for serious production workloads.

General minimum requirements

  • CPU: 64-bit (x64) processor with a minimum of 1.4 GHz. Must support NX/DEP, SSE4.2, POPCNT, CMPXCHG16b, LAHF/SAHF, PrefetchW and SLAT
  • RAM:512 MB for Server Core, 2 GB for Desktop Experience (GUI)
  • Disk: at least 32 GB of space (updates, additional roles and logs require much more)
  • Firmware: UEFI 2.3.1c with Secure Boot
  • Security: TPM 2.0 required for modern security features
  • Network: Gigabit Ethernet network card (1 Gbps)
  • Display: at least 1024 × 768 to use the GUI properly
  • Internet connection: recommended for activation, updates and online services

Practical tips for real environments

The minimum requirements are only necessary to ‘start up’ the system. For a server that has to work hard (AD, file server, Hyper-V, SQL, applications, etc.), it is much more realistic to aim for:

  • CPU: 64-bit, 2.0 GHz or higher, multi-core
  • RAM: at least 16 GB (or more if you are doing virtualisation or databases)
  • Disk: 160 GB+ on SSD, with separate space for data and backups
  • Virtualisation: for Hyper-V in production, consider 32 GB of RAM or more and fast storage (SSD/NVMe) <

To check whether your server is compatible with Windows Server 2025, you need to compare your hardware with Microsoft's official requirements: there is no ‘magic tool’ like on Windows client, so the check must be done manually with some technical support tools.

Basic hardware check

  • CPU: ensure you have a 64-bit (x64) processor with at least 1.4 GHz that supports:
  1. SSE4.2, POPCNT
  2. NX/DEP, CMPXCHG16b, LAHF/SAHF, PrefetchW
  3. SLAT (EPT/NPT) if you want to use Hyper-V
  • RAM:
  1. minimum 512 MB for Server Core (preferably 4 GB+)
  2. minimum 2 GB for Desktop Experience (preferably 8–16 GB in production)
  • Disk: at least 32 GB free, but for a real environment consider 160 GB+ on SSD
  1. Firmware and securityUEFI 2.3.1c with Secure Boot. TPM 2.0 to take full advantage of security features
  • Network: Gigabit Ethernet (1 Gbps) card

Useful tools for checking

  1. Use msinfo32 (System Information) to view CPU model, RAM, firmware (BIOS/UEFI).
  2. Use Coreinfo (Sysinternals) to verify that the CPU supports SSE4.2, POPCNT, SLAT and other required extensions.
  3. Check your server model in the Microsoft Windows Server Catalogue to see if it is certified for Windows Server 2025.

If you want to perform an in-place upgrade

  • You can only upgrade directly from Windows Server 2016, 2019, or 2022.
  • If you have 2012/2012 R2, you must first upgrade to a supported intermediate version and then to 2025.

Best practice
Before migrating to production, always test Windows Server 2025 in a lab environment or on an evaluation VM to verify driver, application and performance compatibility without risking critical systems.

Windows Server 2025 introduit un modèle d'identité moderne entièrement intégré, avec une synchronisation hybride avancée entre Active Directory local et Microsoft Entra ID (anciennement Azure AD). La connexion unique (SSO) améliorée est activée et la gestion des accès utilise l'accès conditionnel basé sur les risques, qui évalue des paramètres tels que le comportement anormal de l'utilisateur, la position géographique et l'état de l'appareil afin d'appliquer des politiques dynamiques en temps réel.

With the separation of administrative tiers and new privileged access isolation policies, Windows Server 2025 enhances defence against Pass-the-Hash and Golden Ticket attacks. It also introduces enhanced authentication for privileged accounts, limiting lateral reach within the AD forest.

The Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) replication engine has been enhanced to provide ultra-fast and reliable replication between domain controllers in multiple geographical sites, reducing convergence times and improving data consistency.

VM Hot Patching allows security and maintenance updates to be installed on running virtual machines without the need for a reboot. This ensures continuous business continuity, which is particularly useful in mission-critical or high-availability environments, drastically reducing downtime.

Windows containers benefit from instant start-up and consume fewer resources, thanks to runtime and file system optimisations. In addition, Windows Server 2025 introduces a new sandboxing engine for containers, offering advanced workload isolation, comparable to the level of Linux Pods. Direct integration with Kubernetes and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) on-premises is supported.

SMB over QUIC is a technology that enables secure access to file servers via the SMB protocol encapsulated in QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections). It eliminates the need for VPNs, uses TLS 1.3 for end-to-end encryption, and ensures high performance even on unstable or public connections. It is the ideal solution for secure remote access from corporate or BYOD devices.

ReFS is designed for data integrity, offering automatic resilience against corruption, intelligent tiering between SSDs and HDDs, and metadata optimisation. In Windows Server 2025, it is further refined for enterprise environments, data centres, and high-I/O workloads.

S2D has been updated with support for asynchronous replication between geo-distributed clusters, faster failover, and native integration with disaster recovery orchestration tools. It is ideal for creating scalable and resilient hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), even without dedicated SAN storage.

Yes. It is designed to be DevOps-friendly: it includes full support for Windows containers, Kubernetes, AKS, management via Windows Admin Centre, enhanced CLI tools, and compatibility with CI/CD pipelines. Integration with Azure and support for Hybrid Cloud are native.

The planned editions include:

  • Standard: ideal for medium-sized businesses, with limitations on VMs and advanced features.

  • Datacentre: for highly virtualised environments, includes unlimited VMs, Hot Patching, SMB over QUIC, advanced ReFS, and all enterprise features.

  • Azure Edition: Optimised for Azure hybrid environments, HCI, and cloud orchestration.

Windows Server 2025 introduces a new NVMe-optimised storage stack, rewritten to take full advantage of the ultra-low latency and high IOPS of NVMe SSDs. According to Microsoft benchmarks, there is an increase in IOPS performance of up to +90% compared to Windows Server 2022, making it ideal for I/O-intensive workloads such as databases and HCI environments.

No. In Windows Server 2025, SMB over QUIC has been extended to the Standard and Datacenter editions. This means that you can now configure secure file sharing over the internet without a VPN, using UDP port 443 and TLS 1.3 for end-to-end encrypted connections over public or untrusted networks.

Yes. The new File Explorer in Windows Server 2025 natively supports not only the classic .ZIP format, but also compressed formats such as .7z and .TAR. This allows administrators to manage archives without third-party software, directly from the graphical interface or from scripts.

For the first time in over a decade, Active Directory Database (NTDS.DIT) supports 32KB pages (instead of the traditional 8KB), allowing for the storage of larger attributes and objects. This improves scalability for complex enterprise environments and reduces the structural limitations of the directory.

Windows Server 2025 improves the Kerberos protocol, with native support for AES-256 for more secure encryption. It also introduces new controls to mitigate brute force attacks on local accounts, with smarter lockout thresholds and context-based policies.

Windows Server 2025 removes or deprecates the following features:

  • WordPad: completely removed from the operating system.
  • WMIC (WMI Command Line): no longer installed by default; now a Feature on Demand (FOD). Microsoft encourages the use of PowerShell to manage WMI.
  • WSUS (Windows Server Update Services): officially deprecated. Although still present, Microsoft recommends migrating to Azure Update Manager or Microsoft Intune.
  • TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1: disabled by default to improve network connection security. Only TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3 remain active.

Yes, the WinGet package manager is now pre-installed in Windows Server 2025. You can use it from the command line (CLI) to install software and tools with a simple command, for example: winget install Google.Chrome

This speeds up server configuration, automation, and management via DevOps scripts.

DTrace, the advanced dynamic tracing tool originally developed for Solaris, is now included natively in Windows Server 2025. It allows administrators to monitor kernel events and system performance in real time, which is useful for debugging, tuning, and advanced problem diagnosis. It operates at a very low level and enables analysis that other tools (such as PerfMon) cannot offer.

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