Microsoft has shared details about the new features and improvements in System Center 2025, which hit the general availability status alongside Windows Server 2025 (which has been off to a very rocky start) earlier this month.

For those not familiar, System Center (SC) helps in server and data center deployment, management, and monitoring with its various components like Configuration Manager (SCCM), Operations Manager (SCOM), Data Protection Manager (SCDPM), Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM), Service Manager (SCSM), and System Center Orchestrator (SCO). The company writes:

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.

Security enhancement is the major upgrade in SC 2025, with VMM 2025 moving to Transport Layer Security (TLS) version 1.3 from CredSSP (Credential Security Support Provider protocol) and NTLM (New Technology Lan Manager). All virtual machines created with VMM 2025 will default to Generation 2, which is UEFI firmware-based that’s said to be more secure than BIOS firmware-based Generation 1 VMs.

VM 2025 supports Azure Stack HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure) 23H2, which is the latest version, and various Linux distros, including Ubuntu Linux 24.04, RHEL 9, Debian 13 and 12, SUSE Linux 15, Oracle Linux 9, and Rocky Linux 9 and 8.

Speaking of security, OLE DB (Object Linking and Embedding Database) version 19 is supported by DPM 2025 and SCO 2025. OLE DB driver 19.3.5 for SQL Server is the latest GA version, according to Microsoft’s website, and it addresses the CVE-2024-37334 RCE flaw.

Other security improvements include the ability to securely store passphrases in Azure Key Vault and VMware virtual TPM (vTPM) support on DPM 2025. Finally, SCO 2025 supports the latest version of .NET with .NET 8 (LTSC release). You can read the official blog post here on the Tech Community site.

Aside from System Center 2025, earlier this month, Microsoft also detailed all the improvements in Windows Server 2025. Performance boost seems to be a big upgrade as the company promises improved IOPS and VM CPU/RAM usage. Microsoft notes that VM performance gain is on Generation 2 VMM, which we discussed above. It writes:

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 SSd[sic])

…

Windows Server 2025 introduces massive performance and scalability improvements that come from Azure. Windows Server 2025 Hyper-V virtual machine maximums:

• Maximum memory per VM: 240 Terabytes* — (10x previous)
• Maximum virtual processors per VM: 2048 VPs* — (~8.5x previous)

You can find more details about it in this blog post here on Microsoft’s official site. Aside from that, the tech giant has also released a new free book about security guidelines that can be downloaded as a PDF.