u/PIOMATech

I am having an issue with the SQL Server 2025 starting when using an sMSA account that is 15 characters. With the 2 letter NETBIOS domain name and the $, it's 19 characters, similar to this:

AB\serviceactnm-sq$

If I use 1 less character, the MSSQLSERVER service will start, but the problem is the above never had any issue in any other version of SQL server and it doesn't exceed the NETBIOS password character limits. I even tried updating to the latest CU6 released in June with no luck.

This definitely sounds like a bug or does anyone know if Microsoft had some other reasoning behind it?