Susan Bradley
Server 2025 includes the ability to perform “hotpatching,” which allows the patching administrator to install updates and not reboot the system. While this is not new, as it was first introduced in Windows Server 2022 Datacenter: Azure edition, it now is also an option through Azure Arc. Azure Arc enables management and allows the Windows Server internal licensing service for Hotpatch to run so that Hotpatch updates are delivered to customers. You can hotpatch Windows Server 2025 physical servers or virtual machines, and those VMs can run on Hyper-V, VMware, or anything else that supports Microsoft’s protection-focused Virtualization Based Security standard.
Getting ready to migrate to Server 2025
Finally In order to migrate to Server 2025 you need to be at the Server 2016 functional level. For Server 2025, if you want a 32K database page size, you need to raise the forest level to Server 2025. In place upgrades are also supported for Server 2025.
Beginning with Windows Server 2025, you can upgrade up to four versions at a time, meaning you can upgrade directly to Windows Server 2025 from Windows Server 2012 R2 and later. Prior to this, you could only upgrade up to two versions at a time.
