There is something fundamentally wrong with Windows Server 2025.

TLDR: Listen to the seasoned admins here: don't install Server 2025. Just don't. It's still not ready for prime time, and it probably won't be for another year. Since its 2024-11-01 release, the OS keeps getting worse. You'd think most issues would have been ironed out by now, but nope.

It has been exactly a year (2025-05-28) of using Windows Server 2025 in my environment, and I'm finally accepting defeat by downgrading most of my VMs back to Server 2022.

I used to think the issues reported by others on here were never going to happen to me and that these were isolated incidents. Yes, I've previously said that my environment had no issues (which was true at the time). I just didn't give the pot enough time to boil.

Over time, the issues piled up, and shit just got crazier:

1. Installing Server 2025 with a autounattend.xml containing a disk partition configuration (using the built-in commands) didn't work. Workaround was to use scripted diskpart commands created by the generator.
2. Windows 10 (22H2) and 11 (23H2) workstations kept losing domain trust with a pair of 2025 DCs in place. Fine, let's roll out the Windows 11 24H2 upgrade to fix it. I thought this was all behind us until the issues resurfaced yet again 3-4 months ago, even with 24H2. A few users are suggesting upgrading to 25H2 to mitigate this issue.
3. Many servers do not automatically reboot after installing updates, requiring manual intervention. Applying the registry keys in the linked thread seems to have helped.
4. The RDS Connection Broker randomly stops working and requires a restart, usually after a Patch Tuesday reboot.
5. NVIDIA vGPU on RDS 2025 is broken. Reconnecting to an existing session with a vGPU fails and locks up the server. Since July 2025, the workaround was to remove the GPU from the guest. Testing the exact same setup on Server 2022 works.
6. Windows Update has significantly slowed down to a crawl. Reboots take an abnormally long time. My small handful of 2019 VMs are insanely quick to update to this day.
7. The WSUS Reporting Service randomly stops working and requires a restart.
8. A few days ago, I had a 2025 RDS Session Host server lose trust with the domain.
9. Domain replication traffic randomly stops working every few weeks (which explain the trust issues I had above) requiring frequent restarts.
10. The final nail in the coffin was when I tried resetting a user's password on Monday, only to realize DC #2 was yet again out of sync.

Yesterday, I replaced that faulty 2025 DC with 2022, and I plan to do the other one today.

Every single server that experienced an issue was a newly created VM with a fresh installation of 2025 (no in-place upgrades). The pair of DCs I setup were only running ADDS and nothing else. There were no time synchronization issues in my domain (DCs pulls time via a pair of firewalls) and DNS did not seem to be the issue at play. The only way to fix AD synchronization was to restart the affected VM.

The rest of my environment will be downgraded within the next few weeks. A few things will remain on 2025 (NPS, DHCP, CA, DFS, SMB... unless they blow up too) but most will go back to 2022, namely AD, RDS and ERP-specific VMs.

What a colossal waste of time.