Hey everyone,
Let’s kick this off by highlighting that as of this moment, Microsoft SQL Server 2025 has not yet been validated for the Veeam Data Platform, as it was only made GA yesterday the 18th November 2025, so the information I’m providing here is in preparation for the inevitable support when it’s passed through Veeam’s QA.
Microsoft have now released Microsoft SQL Server 2025 and in reviewing the changes, I stumbled upon some insights that I thought would be worth highlighting to those still using Microsoft SQL Server to power their Veeam Data Platform installations.
Starting with Microsoft SQL Server 2025 Standard Edition, Microsoft are making two key changes that will impact scalability; an increased CPU core count, and increased maximum RAM limits. Now they are:
- CPU Socket Count: This is unchanged and still a maximum of 4x CPU Sockets. If you’re finding idle cores a lot with your SQL Server instance, make sure this isn’t your limit!
- CPU Core Count: This is increasing 50% from a maximum of 24 cores to 32 cores!
- RAM: Previously SQL Server Standard Edition supported a maximum of 128GB of RAM, this has now doubled to 256GB RAM.
For those using Veeam Data Platform at scale, these benefits will inevitably enhance the maximum concurrency of the database, definitely something for a Service Provider or other large deployment to consider upgrading for.
Then we have Microsoft SQL Server 2025 Express Edition. Whilst this doesn’t see any increases in core counts or RAM, there’s still a fix for a somewhat common headache, maximum database size. Previously, SQL Server Express Edition didn’t support databases larger than 10GB, this has been given a healthy uplift to 50GB now! This was a limitation that was reached in some scenarios such as a lot of tape jobs or large retention on Veeam ONE databases as examples, and it’s great to know that when migrating to PostgreSQL isn’t an option, that SQL Server Express edition can scale better to support the needs of your organisations.
