Hey guys! I'm going to talk about how to install Windows Admin Center
and I'll also show you how to manage servers and desktops from Windows Admin Center.
Starting from Windows Server 2019, Microsoft has
released a free tool called Windows Admin Center (WAC) which allows you to manage a single or
multiple Windows Servers or desktops using a web-based console.
To manage the servers, desktops and clusters,
Windows Admin Center uses PowerShell and you can see those scripts in the console.
Using Windows Admin Center, you can manage your domain-joined Windows servers locally or remotely,
failover clusters such as Windows Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) clusters, Hyper-V clusters,
Kubernetes clusters, or any hosts in an on-premises environment or in the Azure cloud.
Windows Admin Center (WAC) allows you to integrates with Azure services such as Azure Active Directory,
Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, and more.
It also gives you access to many system management features from one single console.
For desktop operating system, you can only manage Windows 10 using Windows Admin Center.
You can also manage Windows Server 2008 R2 or later with limited functionalities.
You can download and install Windows Admin Center
on a Windows desktop operating system or server operating system and it doesn't matter.
I've already logged into a Windows 10 machine and
I'm going to download Admin Center to install it on this desktop machine.
I'm on google and I'll search for Windows Admin Center.
I'll select the microsoft.com site
and I'll click on Download Windows Admin Center.
And I'll click 'Continue'.
And I'll fill the form.
And I'll click continue and hit 'Download'.
You can see the download has completed
and I'll click on MSI package.
The installation wizard opens up.
I'll accept the terms and click next.
You can either select to send only the required diagnostic data
or both required as well as optional diagnostic data.
I’ll keep the default and click on Next.
In this screen, you can use Microsoft Update to update the Windows Admin Center
So, I'll select 'Use Microsoft Update when I check for Updates and click Next.
Click on Next on the screen ‘Install Windows Admin Center on Windows 10’.
In the screen ‘Installing Windows Admin Center’,
you can select a port for the Windows Admin Center site.
I’ll keep the default port which is 6516.
I’ll keep the other options checked and check the option
‘Create a desktop shortcut to launch Windows Admin Center
and I'll click 'Install'.
The installation will begin and you need to wait for the installation to complete.
In the screen ‘One more thing…’, the wizard informs you that you
need to accept the certificate for ‘Windows Admin Center Client’
and you can select the option ‘Open Windows Admin Center’ to open soon after you close the wizard.
I'll not select this option and I'll click on Finish to close the wizard.
To launch the Windows Admin Center, double-click on the shortcut icon on the desktop.
It will open up a browser and navigate to https://localhost:6516.
The first time you open, it will prompt you to accept the certificate for Windows
Admin Center Client which I will select and click on ‘OK’.
By default, it has added my local Windows 10 laptop.
To add your first server and click on ‘+Add’ button
and click on ‘Add’ under ‘Servers’.
I’ll specify a server running Windows Server 2019 operating system and the hostname is 'SERVER02'.
I'll click on Add and it will use the currently logged-on account to add the connection.
Clicking on this server will show us the capabilities of Windows Admin Center
and various toolsets you can use to manage the server.
And many of these tools were tools that we could only access from our server manager
from the tools menu, but now we can actually access them through this web browser
and do it from any computer from any location provided that the firewall ports are open.
There's also some options that we had to use PowerShell to configure.
But we can do that today using Windows Admin Center
such as some clustering and network features.
Let's click on Network and see what we can do.
Here we see our ethernet adapter, and we see our IP address,
and if we scroll down we can see all kinds of information about it.
Our entire IP setup.
If we select our network card and click on 'Settings',
we can make changes to our IP address, subnet mask, gateway, and DNS information.
We can also do that for IPv6 as well.
You can click on PowerShell and it will establish a remote PowerShell session to this server.
You can perform all PowerShell tasks that I could've done if I was logged in locally.
We also have the option to go in and edit the registry as well.
If you have a need to edit the registry you can do that right from here
as if you were logging into the regedit program locally on the computer.
There are many great management features we can use in Windows Admin Center,
whether we're logged locally or from a remote computer in a secure browser session.
I hope you like this video.
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