Microsoft has unveiled the latest enhancements in System Center 2025, which has achieved general availability alongside the much-anticipated Windows Server 2025 earlier this month. This release comes at a time when Windows Server 2025 has faced its share of challenges, but the introduction of System Center 2025 aims to provide a robust solution for server and data center management.
Key Features and Improvements
For those unfamiliar with System Center, it serves as a comprehensive suite for server deployment, management, and monitoring. Its various components, including Configuration Manager (SCCM), Operations Manager (SCOM), Data Protection Manager (SCDPM), Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), Service Manager (SCSM), and System Center Orchestrator (SCO), work in harmony to streamline operations. Microsoft emphasizes that:
By delivering System Center 2025 (SCVMM, SCDPM, SCOM, SCSM & SCO) concurrently with Windows Server 2025, you receive management at-scale for the latest Windows Server version right from Day 0, allowing you to plan upgrades and make the most out of new capabilities to optimize the infrastructure and virtualized software-defined datacenters.
A significant focus of System Center 2025 is on security enhancements. Notably, VMM 2025 transitions to Transport Layer Security (TLS) version 1.3, moving away from the older CredSSP and NTLM protocols. This upgrade ensures that all virtual machines created with VMM 2025 default to Generation 2, which utilizes UEFI firmware—an advancement touted for its superior security compared to the traditional BIOS firmware-based Generation 1 VMs.
Moreover, VMM 2025 is compatible with Azure Stack HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure) 23H2 and supports a variety of Linux distributions, including:
- Ubuntu Linux 24.04
- RHEL 9
- Debian 12 and 13
- SUSE Linux 15
- Oracle Linux 9
- Rocky Linux 8 and 9
In terms of database support, DPM 2025 and SCO 2025 now include OLE DB (Object Linking and Embedding Database) version 19, which addresses the CVE-2024-37334 RCE flaw through the latest OLE DB driver 19.3.5 for SQL Server. Additional security features encompass the secure storage of passphrases in Azure Key Vault and VMware virtual TPM (vTPM) support on DPM 2025. Furthermore, SCO 2025 is equipped with the latest .NET 8 (LTSC release), enhancing its functionality.
Alongside the launch of System Center 2025, Microsoft has also shared improvements in Windows Server 2025, with a particular emphasis on performance enhancements. The company claims that users can expect up to a 60% increase in storage IOPS performance compared to Windows Server 2022 on identical systems, particularly highlighting the performance gains on Generation 2 VMM.
Windows Server 2025 delivers up to 60% more storage IOPs performance compared to Windows Server 2022 on identical systems. (Based on 4K randread using Diskpsd 2.2 with Kioxia CM7 SSDs)
Notable scalability improvements include:
- Maximum memory per VM: 240 Terabytes (10x previous)
- Maximum virtual processors per VM: 2048 VPs (~8.5x previous)
For those interested in exploring these advancements further, Microsoft has also released a complimentary security guidelines book available for download in PDF format, providing valuable insights into best practices for safeguarding systems.
