Windows Server 2022 available as a template

OrionVM continues to see huge demand for remote and work-from-home solutions that perform well, are cost-effective, and implement best security practices. We’ve been at the forefront of this with our partnerships with WatchGuard for their virtual UTM security appliance, Parallels for their remote application server (RAS) product, and our own Backup as a Service platform.

To that end, our release engineering team are pleased to announce the availability of Windows Server 2022 on the platform. Partners can enable this template today, and their customers can select them from the Disks and Instances screen for new virtual servers.

2022 supports the same live networking and disk update features of the platform, as well as our virtual console which provides direct access to the VM. This is especially useful for configuration before attaching a public-facing network, for troubleshooting Windows updates, and to monitor the boot process.

Microsoft have included dozens of new security additions and features to this release, including:

  • stronger SMB encryption and compression
  • TLS 1.3 by default
  • improved kernel and virtualisation isolation
  • faster storage repair in the event of a reboot
  • an improved UDP stack for higher network throughput
  • among many more!

Our own internal tests of this template are encouraging, even when compared to Windows Server 2019. This would serve as a perfect base for remote work solutions, Windows application hosting, and for stacks running ASP.NET and SQL Server.

With Windows Server 2012 R2 nearing end-of-life by Microsoft next year, Windows Server 2022 provides a supported upgrade path for customers running legacy workloads. Templates deployed with Windows Server 2022 will be priced the same as other Windows Server versions.

Contact your account manager or our sales team for more information, or to have a discussion about how you can deploy a Windows stack on our infrastructure.