As you might already noticed, Microsoft has officially named their vNEXT Operating System for servers Windows Server 2025 and we took for a spin the installation of the new build here where we could see the new Install Experience that is part of this build. That's much better compared to the old, “Vista” based setups we used to have until now. Now that we know that the Windows Server 2025 has its name and new install experience, we'll try to go ahead and setup a domain controller in the lab. Hence this post – Windows Server 2025 – Building my new Domain Controller.
Since the Build 26040 has not brought anything new to the “DC” part of the setup, we still expecting to have some older labels with “vNEXT” here and there.
Let's go, and setup this VM. I'll be using my VMware Workstation for the job as I don't have a spare hardware to play with. For this I picked up a Windows Server 2022 template from the drop-down list within VMware Workstation and installed using the ISO downloaded from Microsoft. If you haven't, you can find my steps here.
At first, give your machine a proper name (dc2025 for my lab purpose test), static IP. I'm running isolated network so I also need a DNS.
The actual setup has not changed at all. (surprise -:)) So the same Wizard via Server manager.
One thing we can notice is that the forest and domain functional levels are still at the “vNEXT” levels -:).
(Note: Strangely enough, in October 2023 I have wrote an article about new features of Windows Server 2025 and published the article on StarWind blog. There you can see a screenshot with Forest and domain Functional level 2025! It does mean that Microsoft has changed those Wording back to “vNEXT” in this build? It seems so… )
It should change to the 2025 in the next build I'd suppose.
then let's add a new forest as we're creating everything from scratch. (Not joining my lab domain just yet…).
After validation, just click next and the server will automatically reboots so you'll be able to login as a domain admin. This procedure hasn't changed from Server 2016-2022 experience.
Then after reboot and login, when you check the domain and forest functional levels, we can see that with the latest Build 26040 we “fall back” to the vNEXT level again….
Yes, look at the image below, which is an image from blog post I've written for StarWind back in October 2023.
Well, never mind. This was just a side note anyways.
After you reboot and log back in, you must check your DNS, whether your primary and reverse zones has been properly created. In my case they were not. So I went ahead and created them, then create a pointer in the secondary zone so my DNS resolves correctly, then checked with
nslookup
and everything looked well.
ncpa.cpl - for networking config
dsa.msc - AD config and info
nslookup - dns info and config
I'll keep exploring new features added to Windows Server 2025 in some upcoming blog posts.
Final words
In conclusion, Windows Server 2025 is a major update for Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS) and Lightweight Directory Services (LDS), bringing new features and enhancements that will benefit both administrators and users. Some of the key improvements are:
- A new functional level for domains and forests, which enables the use of a more powerful database engine with a 32K page size and 64-bit long value IDs.
- SMB over QUIC, which allows secure and reliable file access over the internet, without the need for VPNs or complex firewall configurations.
- Active Directory hotpatching, which reduces the downtime and complexity of applying security updates to domain controllers.
- Enhanced security features, such as support for AES-256 encryption for Kerberos tickets, improved auditing and logging, and more granular password policies.
Windows Server 2025 is currently available as an Insider Preview build, and you can join the Windows Server Insider Program to test it out and provide feedback.
Windows Server 2025
- Windows Server 2025 build 26040 has a new Install Experience
- Windows Server 2025 Azure Arc Taskbar Icon
- SMB over QUIC in Windows Server 2025 – What’s this?
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