Microsoft now offers Windows Server 2025 hotpatching through Azure Arc at no additional charge for eligible Azure Arc-enabled servers. Hotpatching installs Windows security updates without restarting the server in most months, but it does not eliminate all reboots. You still need Azure Arc, the Azure Connected Machine agent, Virtualization-based Security, and a supported Windows Server 2025 edition. This article explains what those requirements mean, how to enable the feature, and where its limits are.

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Microsoft vient d'annoncer que le Hotpatching pour Windows Server 2025, piloté via Azure Arc, est désormais gratuit ! Voici comment en profiter.

Le post Le Hotpatching est désormais gratuit pour Windows Server 2025 a été publié sur IT-Connect.

The April 2026 Windows update cycle includes several changes that matter to IT administrators.

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Starting in mid-April 2026, Microsoft allows you to upgrade Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 2022 directly to Windows Server 2025 through Windows Update — no installation media (ISO file or DVD) required. The process is called an in-place upgrade, meaning your installed applications, settings, and server roles remain unchanged while only the operating system version changes. This article covers the prerequisites, the exact registry change you need to make, the step-by-step procedure for both the graphical desktop and the text-only Server Core installation, and the important cases where you must not use this method.

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Windows Server vNext Insider Preview build 29531 introduces ReFS boot, allowing you to install and start Windows Server from a Resilient File System (ReFS)-formatted boot volume for the first time. This feature brings integrity-level metadata checksums, online corruption repair, block cloning, and 35-petabyte volume scalability to the OS boot partition — capabilities that NTFS cannot match. ReFS boot requires UEFI firmware and a minimum of 2 GB for the WinRE partition. Learn how to enable Windows ReFS boot during Windows Server installation.

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Microsoft released version 2602 of the Security Baseline for Windows Server 2025, approximately eight months after the previous version 2506. The update adds 10 new Group Policy settings and removes one, focusing on NTLM auditing, printer security, and authentication hardening. Most of the new policies were already included in the Windows 11 Security Baselines since 2022 and are now being backported to the server edition. The baseline is available as part of the Microsoft Security Compliance Toolkit 1.0.

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