Windows Server 2025 has many new features and capabilities. One area where improvements have been introduced is the area of networking. As Windows admins will attest, networking in Windows Server can be a headache to administer and manage. However, with Windows Server 2025, there have been a wide range of new improvements in the areas of host networking at scale. These new features include three new core technologies that include Network ATC, Network HUD, and Accelerated Networking. Let’s take a look at these and see what features and functionality they bring to the table.
Network challenges with previous versions of Windows Server
When we think back on previous years of host networking setup in Windows Server 2025, these have been quite manual and error prone from the standpoint of management and configuration.
Typically, an admin was required to do the following processes in a tedious and manual way:
- Configure adapter settings like RSS, VMQ, VMMQ individually
- Set up virtual switches and DCB (Data Center Bridging) manually
- Write and test PowerShell scripts to produce configurations
- Make sure of consistency across every vNIC, virtual switch, node, and cluster
As you can imagine, this process is very tedious and labor-intensive. It drastically impacts the velocity in which teams can deploy new infrastructure and make sure configurations are consistent and problem-free. Even when scripts are used, it makes the process still very fragile and error-prone.
Network ATC is intent-based network configuration
With the introduction of Windows Server 2025, Microsoft has also introduced a tool called Network ATC that helps to bring automation and intent-based configurations to host networking. Using network ATC, admins can describe “intents” around network setups, including storage, compute, or management, and then apply these configurations to specific network interfaces.
What this means is an admin doesn’t have to define dozens of settings in a manual way. Instead, they tell the system what the end-result needs to be and the system configures these components automatically.
Features of Network ATC
What are some of the things that you can do with the network ATC feature? You can easily configure the following settings with just a single command:
- Automate adapter settings like RSS, VMQ, VMMQ
- Configure virtual switches, QoS, and DCB settings
- Handle storage IP assignment and enforce symmetry
- Configure live migration bandwidth limits and transport selections
- Configure a custom subnet mask and VLAN configuration
Note the following example command that allows you to configure a host in just a few minutes:
Add-NetIntent -Name “StorageIntent01” -IntentType Storage -AdapterName “Ethernet1” -QosPolicyOverride $override
Installing Network ATC in Windows Server 2025
You can get the new Network ATC installed in Windows Server 2025 by adding it as a feature in Server Manager.
The feature will install like any other feature you add in Server Manager.
After installing the feature, you will be able to run the cmdlets from a PowerShell prompt.
Copy feature
There is a really powerful feature with the Network ATC cmdlets that enables admins to copy the network intent from one server to another or to many others. For example, you might want to configure and test a storage node called TestStore01. After you have the network intent configured on this server, you can use the Copy-NetworkIntent to deploy the same configuration on your target servers to reconfigure the network settings to match your source server.
Copy-NetIntent -Name “StorageIntent01” -SourceComputer TestStore01 -DestinationCluster ProdCluster01
This cmdlet makes deploying network settings across an environment much quicker and consistent, which will accelerate the process.
Upcoming features with Network ATC
There are several new features coming to Network ATC coming to Windows Server 2025 that will improve configuration for various network settings across the board. Note the following.
NIC-Level RSS config
Receive Side Scaling (RSS) is a setting that allows incoming network traffic to balance across multiple cores of the CPU. However, previously, RSS was configured at the intent level. With a future update, Microsoft is making the following changes:
- RSS can now be set per NIC
- There will be improved defaults to reduce the need for manual overrides
- Logic will automatically calculate the best processor/queue mapping
Admins will have much finer-grained control over network traffic and how it is handled to reduce CPU use.
Custom subnet and VLANs
Before, customizing storage subnets and VLANs meant disabling automatic IP assignment and configuring everything manually. The new enhancements allow you to:
- Configure custom subnets and VLANs directly with parameters in Add-NetIntent
- Keep automatic IP assignments while customizing the network
- Easily support single VLAN and multiple subnets
Microsoft is stating this will roll out mid-2025 and will help to make advanced networking designs much simpler without losing the ability to automate solutions.
Improved PowerShell documentation
PowerShell support for Network ATC has also been updated:
- Better Get-Help cmdlet for Network ATC
- There are new examples, parameter descriptions, and usage scenarios
- There is one centralized documentation repository available at aka.ms/ATCPowerShell
Network HUD
So far, we have looked at configuration with Network ATC. The new Network HUD is a feature coming in Windows Server 2025 and it is used to proactively identify and remediate network issues. Network issues are some of the most complicated and complex in the enterprise datacenter. Network HUD helps with this complexity.
It can analyze event logs, performance counters, network traffic and other metrics and devices to identify issues before they happen. If preventing issues isn’t possible, it will alert admins with actionable messages to help resolve the issue. It can help determine things like the local switchports have the correct VLANs configured and DCB configurations.
Examples of how HUD can help
We might use the example of a scenario where storage traffic is having issues connecting between your host and storage. This might be an issue that is difficult to diagnose. Perhaps the VLAN tags don’t match. An engineer may have accidentally configured storage for VLAN 25 but the host is configured for VLAN 26 and this is the VLAN advertised by the switch. Without HUD, this issue may be difficult to find since traffic would just silently get dropped.
With HUD though, the LLDP parsing detects that there is an inconsistency in VLAN tagging and flags this before it becomes a major issue.
Easy SR-IOV at the edge with Accelerated Networking
Last but not least, Windows Server 2025 is bringing what Microsoft calls Accelerated Networking. This is a streamlined way to enable SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization.
What Is SR-IOV?
SR-IOV is a technology that allows you to split a single physical network device like a NIC and present it to multiple separate virtual devices to the host system. This increases performance in virtualized environments since it can bypass the software network stack and directly interact with the hardware.
Note the following advantages this provides to network traffic:
- Reduced latency
- Lower jitter
- Lower CPU overhead for network traffic
Azure has used SR-IOV running under the hood for years and Microsoft has called it “Accelerated Networking.” Now, organizations can have the same capabilities configured for your datacenter or edge cluster with Windows Server 2025. This can now be done with a much simpler workflow.
Manual vs Accelerated Networking Setup
Note the following steps that are required for manually enabling SR-IOV:
- You need to verify the BIOS and adapter support
- Drivers need to be updated and running the latest patches
- It can involve manually calculating Q pairs and virtual functions
- You may need to script IOV weight and allocation settings for each virtual machine
With Accelerated Networking in Windows Server 2025 the new “intent-based” configuration involves a workflow that looks like the following:
- You choose a compute intent
- Set node reservation parameters
- Enable SR-IOV with a single command or WAC action
- Then apply per-VM settings as needed
When using the network intent configuration of SR-IOV, the system checks all prerequisites automatically and it flags any unsupported configurations. It allows you to enable or disable settings in bulk.
Accelerated Networking diagnostics
Another advantage of Accelerated Networking is it has built-in diagnostics. If something goes wrong when enabling SR-IOV on a virtual machine without enough vCPUs, Accelerated Networking will flag the issue. This helps to eliminate the need to search through cryptic logs or other diagnostic tools.
Combined with Network HUD, this gives you a full diagnostic and health feedback loop from configuration through performance monitoring.
Wrapping up
Microsoft Windows Server 2025 has many new capabilities and features in the area of host networking. Microsoft has introduced declarative configuration management along with automated health checks and hardware-level performance checks that can now be brought on-premises with Windows Server 2025. These automated, intelligent checks help to make it easier to run reliable workloads in a high performance way and in a way that involves less troubleshooting, tedious tasks, and frustration.
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