Revolutionizing Network Management and Performance with ATC, HUD and AccelNet on Windows Server 2025

In an era where seamless network management and enhanced performance are paramount, the release of Network ATC, Network HUD, and AccelNet for Windows Server 2025 marks a significant milestone. These groundbreaking innovations are designed to optimize the way we manage, monitor, and accelerate network operations, promising unprecedented efficiency and reliability.

 

Network ATC

 

Historically, deployment and management of networking for Failover clusters has been complex and error prone. The configuration flexibility with the host networking stack means there are many moving parts that can be easily misconfigured or overlooked. Keeping up with the latest best practices is also a challenge as improvements are continuously made to the underlying technologies. Additionally, configuration consistency across failover cluster nodes is vital for reliability.

 

Network ATC simplifies the deployment and network configuration management for Windows Server 2025 clusters. It provides an intent-based approach to host network deployment. Customers specify one or more intents (management, compute, or storage) for a network adapter, and we automate the deployment of the intended configuration.

 

 

Network ATC helps to:

• Reduce host networking deployment time, complexity, and errors
• Deploy the latest Microsoft-validated and supported best practices
• Ensure configuration consistency across the cluster
• Eliminate configuration drift

One of the greatest benefits of Network ATC is its ability to remediate configuration drift. Have you ever wondered “who changed that?” or said, “we must have missed this node.” You’ll never worry about this again with Network ATC at the helm. Expanding the cluster to add new nodes? Simply install the feature on the new node, join the cluster and within minutes, the expected configuration will be deployed.

 

For more details about deploying and managing Network ATC on Windows Server 2025, please check here: Deploy host networking with Network ATC. You can manage Network ATC through Powershell cmdlets or Windows Admin Center.

 

Figure: Network ATC management in Windows Admin Center

 

Network HUD (Coming Soon)

 

Network HUD is an upcoming Windows Server 2025 feature that will proactively identifies and remediates operational network issues.

Managing a network for business applications is challenging. Ensuring stability and optimization requires coordination across the physical network (switches, cabling, NICs), host operating system (virtual switches, virtual NICs), and the applications running in VMs or containers. Each component has its own configurations and capabilities, often managed by different teams. Even with a perfect setup, a bad configuration elsewhere in the network can degrade performance.

 

The complexity of managing these components has reached an all-time high, with numerous tools and technologies involved. Windows Server OS provides a wealth of information through event logs, performance counters, and tools, but analyzing this data when issues arise requires expertise and time, often after the problem has occurred.

 

Network HUD excels by analyzing real-time data from event logs, performance counters, tools like Pktmon, network traffic, and physical devices to identify issues before they happen. In many cases, it prevents issues by adjusting your system to avoid exacerbating problems. When prevention isn't possible, Network HUD alerts you with actionable messages to resolve the issue.

 

Network HUD leverages capabilities in the physical switch to ensure that your configuration matches the physical network. For example, it can determine whether the locally connected switchports have the correct VLAN settings and the correct data center bridging configuration required for RDMA storage traffic to function.

 

Network HUD is built as a true cloud service that runs on-premises. It will ship as an Arc extension and will be part of Windows Server Azure Arc Management (WSAAM) services. This allows us to bring in more capabilities and make these available to you as soon as they are ready.

 

AccelNet

 

Accelerated Networking simplifies the management of single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) for virtual machines hosted on Windows Server 2025 clusters. SR-IOV provides a high-performance data path that bypasses the host, which reduces latency, jitter, and CPU utilization for the most demanding network workloads. This is particularly useful in High Performance Computing (HPC) environments, Real-time applications such as financial trading platforms, and virtualized network functions.  

The following figure illustrates how two VMs communicate with and without SR-IOV.

 

 

Without SR-IOV, all networking traffic in and out of the VM traverses the host and the virtual switch. With SR-IOV, network traffic that arrives at VM’s network interface (NIC) is forwarded directly to VM.

 

SR-IOV has been available in Windows Server since 2012 R2 days. So, what benefit does AccelNet provide?

 

1. Prerequisite checking: Informs users if the Windows Server cluster hosts support SR-IOV, checking for OS version and hyperthreading status among other things.
2. Host Configuration: Ensures SR-IOV is enabled on the correct vSwitch that hosts virtual machine workloads and allows configuration of reserve nodes in case of failover to prevent resource over-subscription.
3. Simplified VM performance settings: It can be overwhelming to identify how many queue pairs may be needed for a VM that is being enabled through SR-IOV. AccelNet abstracts performance settings into “Low,” “Medium,” and “High” to simplify configuration.
4. Health Monitoring and Diagnostics: Leverages Network HUD to identify and remediate configuration/performance related issues. Examples include NIC SR-IOV support, Live migration management, etc. (Coming Soon)
5. Simplified management with Windows Admin Center: All AccelNet management functionality is available through Powershell and with an easy-to-use UI through Windows Admin Center (Latter coming Soon).

 

AccelNet is part of Windows Server Azure Arc Management (WSAAM) services. To learn more about Accelnet, please check here.

 

As organizations continue to navigate the challenges of an ever-evolving digital landscape, the integration of these advanced features into Windows Server 2025 ensures they are equipped with the tools needed to achieve excellence in network management and performance. Embrace the future of networking with Windows Server 2025 and experience the transformative power of Network ATC, Network HUD, and AccelNet.

 

We are excited to share all these innovations with you. Upgrade to Windows Server 2025 to try out these features, we look forward to your feedback. For any suggestions, opinions or issues, please reach out to us at edgenetfeedback@microsoft.com.