Microsoft plans to deprecate Windows Deployment Services

Microsoft has announced that the Windows Deployment Services (WDS) server role will be deprecated starting with the Windows Server release that follows Windows Server 2025. This means the company will halt further development of WDS, including its management tools, services and PXE boot capabilities, with an eventual goal of fully removing it in a future release. The move follows earlier partial cuts to WDS functionality, such as dropping boot.wim support in 2021 and disabling hands-free deployment by default after the April 2026 updates, tied to guidance around CVE-2026-0386. Microsoft stresses that WDS keeps working as supported on Windows Server 2025 and earlier per their normal lifecycle, that Configuration Manager's OS deployment feature is untouched, and that third-party deployment tools not reliant on WDS are unaffected—but it recommends administrators start moving any WDS-backed PXE or multicast deployments over to Configuration Manager.