Forum Discussion
Windows Server on ARM64 (Insider Previews)
MicrosoftHi Steskalj, Thanks for your interest in Windows Server on Arm. We are evaluating this opportunity so your feedback helps. Please feel free to share the scenarios that you want to run as that would help our planning.
With the addition of copilot+ Surface arm64 laptops being rolled out to the fleet as well as some legacy Surface Pro X and Dev Kits in our environment a version of arm64 windows server would allow us to provide a single unified platform to our engineers and developers to run and test with Server VMs on their workstations. Instead we are evaluating our arm64 strategy due to the need for Intel based chips for these users.
I hope that Microsoft takes seriously the enterprise community's desire to implement the cost saving of arm64 architecture inherent in the platform but cannot do so until we have a total solution for testing and rollout in our end-user and datacenter solutions.
Thank you for passing this along to the server product team and I hope to hear some positive momentum in the months to come around this community ask.- I am looking to run this on low wattage endpoints in manufacturing facilities where ARM would be beneficial. Also, I would want to use this in our future high density private cloud infrastructure. We are looking at ARM based servers since we can run a large amount of them in a smaller footprint.
- Sandeep_Singh1
Steskalj Thanks for sharing your usecase.
- Whereas, I am very aware that Microsoft is primarily focused on SaaS solutions such as it's cloud platform Azure, which does have a certain purpose. I thought it prudent to provide logic as to why it can be useful to pursue the ARM64 based platform for Microsoft Server.
1. We are all too aware of the recent third-party software update that crippled primarily Azure based systems.
Therefore, local redundancy in Servers (and workstations) still makes sense.
2. Power requirements for ARM64 based systems are considerably much lower than other platforms.
3. It potentially opens a doorway for Microsoft to offer it's products on a platform you have limited access to. Apple's "Silicon" based processors (if Microsoft were a little more willing to work with Apple (who generally stays out of the Server market) to come up with a "Silicon based" bootable Server that is independent of MacOS. The only potential conditions I would foresee Apple insisting on is a disclaimer of liability for running non-Apple operating systems on Apple Computers, and a guarantee that Microsoft will not purposely allow its Client Operating Systems to use that bootstrap on "Silicon based" systems. Thereby restricting it to Microsoft Server only.
4. Imagine a Microsoft Surface Windows Server. USB C with Thunderbolt 4 is now fast enough to facilitate connecting enough external storage for this innovative novel concept to work.
