Windows Admin Center is an excellent tool
for managing your virtual machines,
whether they are running on-premises
or in the cloud.
Hello, my name is Prasidh Arora
and I am a program manager
on the Windows Admin Center team.
Remote virtual machine management
has never been easier with Windows Admin Center
and remains a heavy area of investment for the team.
For this video, let’s focus on
on-premises virtual machines
and more specifically, the Virtual Machines tool.
Hyper-V or the Virtual Machines tool
is the most used tool in Windows Admin Center
and we’ve added a whole bunch
of new features in version 2009
released in September 2020.
So let’s get right to it.
Here I have a two-node cluster
and I want to show you
the value and elegance
we have brought and added
with Windows Admin Center.
This is a two-node cluster with eight total drives,
37 virtual machines, 19 of them are running.
So even with two nodes,
you can just see how powerful
you can deliver an HCI system
and Admin Center makes it
easy and elegant to manage.
I can see, for example,
my cluster performance over the course of an hour,
over the course of a day,
over the course of a week
giving me quick insight
into the performance of my system.
Of course, let’s focus on the Virtual Machines tool.
The Virtual Machines tool
in Windows Admin Center includes
high-level Hyper-V host resource monitoring.
Again, I have 18 virtual machines running,
six that are turned off, and 13 that are saved.
I can immediately see which of these are
taking the most amount of memory,
most amount of CPU.
I can see I/O performance metrics,
virtual machine health alerts,
and events for the Hyper-V host server
or the entire cluster, as we have here,
in a single dashboard.
And of course,
I am going to be spending most of my time
looking at the inventory page.
Admin Center brings a unified experience
bringing Hyper-V Manager and
Failover Cluster Manager capabilities
together into one place.
I can view
all of the virtual machines across a cluster
and if I want, drill down into
a single virtual machine or a single server
for more advanced management and troubleshooting.
We have designed simplified, yet powerful workflows
for virtual machine management
and new UI experiences tailored to IT administration scenarios
to create, manage, and replicate virtual machines.
This specific video will go through the end-to-end process of
creating and managing a singular virtual machine
using Windows Admin Center.
I will touch on some of our already existing features
which shall be needed to create this VM
and some of our brand-new features
that come with this new release
of Admin Center version 2009.
I am going to start with just creating a new virtual machine.
For those of you that have created a VM
in Admin Center in the past,
you’ll notice that there is this new navigation bar.
We realized that as we
kept growing our management tools,
searching through this list got very cumbersome.
So, we did some research and grouped these tasks accordingly.
You’ll now be able to create a new VM under the “Add” group.
Let’s just call it Demo-VM.
Make it a Gen 2 VM.
And I will create the data on node 2.
For the purposes of this demo, I am going to set this
to some random path
where none of my other VMs are saved.
I will give it 4 GB of memory,
and connect it to one of my virtual switches.
I will add some storage.
I can let Admin Center create an empty VHD
and attach an ISO to it
or in this case, I have a VHDX file
with Windows Admin Center 2019...
…sorry, with Windows Server 2019 running on it.
With this long list of virtual machines,
it really becomes increasingly difficult to find VMs,
so Admin Center has made tagging your VMs a very easy task.
In this case, I have already defined a variety of tags or categories
based on the operating system of my VM.
So I will add
ws-2019 to this virtual machine that is running 2019
and filter down my list to only virtual machines with that tag.
Of course, I can mix and match tags
to make it even easier to find these VMs.
With this filtered-down list,
I can easily find this new Demo-VM
that we just created together.
And since this is a brand-new server,
I will have to power it on
and have to set up the out-of-the-box experience.
Although you could RDP into your server
or RDP into your VM to do so,
there is actually no need to leave Windows Admin Center at all.
With the Connect experience,
you can VMConnect to your virtual machine
right from within your browser
and go through the out-of-the-box experience that way.
So I’ll speed this part a little bit.
Now, with this VM,
I picked a Windows Server 2019 Datacenter with a GUI
but this could easily be a Core VM
thus making some of those basic VM
and OS management tasks
a little harder
even with this VMConnect experience.
So, I will go back to our inventory page
and perform a lot of the tasks
that IT admins would need to do
to set up a VM right from the VM tool
or inventory page of Windows Admin Center.
I’ll start with monitoring.
Clicking on the hyperlink of this VM
brings you to a detailed page
showing you a lot more information about your VM
in a single pane of glass.
You can see this page or, use this page to
manage your checkpoints, administer the VHDs,
networks, servers associated with this VM,
as well as track the performance
from the last hour, day, week, month, or year.
Of course, this VM was just created
so we can only really see information from the last hour.
Now let’s go back to our inventory page
and go through some of the
more interesting features that are part of Admin Center.
Under “Manage,” I will see the “Move” command
giving me the ability to live migrate the entire VM
or just its storage to another location
bringing no downtime to the VM itself.
Admin Center brings in the capabilities
of Hyper-V Manager or Failover Cluster Manager,
but actually goes beyond these tools
without even requiring you to switch between two individual tools.
And along with migrating your cluster,
Admin Center brings you capabilities to migrate this VM
to any other server or cluster managed
in Windows Admin Center and vice-versa.
For this demo, I am going to live migrate
to another node in this cluster.
I’m going to pick a random path here once again
and with just a few button clicks,
our demo virtual machine
has migrated to another node.
And after many user requests,
Admin Center version 2009 also brings in
the functionality to perform live storage migrations,
truly lighting up some end-to-end scenarios
for managing VMs in Admin Center.
Just as Hyper-V or Failover Cluster Manager did,
live storage migration in Admin Center allows for
redistributing to storage capabilities,
defragmenting VM storage space,
migrating from a local storage to a network storage,
and many other capabilities
that are common to IT administrators.
This task takes…
…this task takes just a few button clicks in Admin Center
whether you are moving all your storage to one location
or splitting it across various locations.
In this case, I am going to move all my storage to
where all my other VMs are stored
since I didn’t do that in the first place when creating a VM,
I will click "Move."
And I can click into my notification bar
to see the progress
and after just a little bit of time, it will complete.
So next, in Admin Center version 2009,
we bring in some new capabilities to managing
the operating system of your virtual machine.
Let’s start with giving many people access
to your VM by joining a domain.
Under the "Manage" tab, you will see
a new button to join your virtual machine
to a new domain.
Normally, this task would require me to RDP or VMConnect
and navigate to the computer settings to join the domain
and give other users in the domain access to this VM.
Not anymore.
By entering your domain and some credentials,
Admin center will join your running virtual machine to a domain
making it even easier to manage.
Of course, this requires a restart
which Admin Center will take care for you too.
While this virtual machine
propagates throughout the Microsoft Redmond domain,
I would like to highlight some of the
most valued features of managing VMs,
which are all hidden--under the "Settings" tab.
The settings give you granular control over
memory, disks, networks, and much more of your VM
and we are working to bring in
a lot of the important features from
Hyper-V Manager into this page.
For example, I can go into disks and add a new VHD
or make sure that my live storage migration was
indeed successful and that it’s in that location.
And it was!
Here, I’ll just change the memory of…
…the memory assigned to this VM to 5 GB.
So, going back to our inventory page,
I’m actually excited to talk about this new feature
that gives you power to manage the OS of your VM
using standard Windows Admin Center tools.
Under connect, as we saw before,
users have the ability to connect in browser
or download an RDP file,
but something that really blurs the differences between
the OSes whether it's with or without a GUI,
you are now able to manage your VM
using standard Admin Center tools
right from within the inventory page,
truly bringing in that
complete granular management, configuration,
troubleshooting, and maintenance functionality
to your VMs running on-prem.
As you can see,
the VM is joined to the Redmond domain,
just like we did,
and I have all of this bread-and-butter
Admin Center tools at my disposal.
I am able to see the expired certificates for this VM
or navigate to the local users and groups tool
and add my own domain account
as an administrator to this machine.
So, let’s hop back
into the virtual machine inventory page
and I want to demo one last feature
that was released in version 2007
—and it is just so powerful—
I really had to show it to all of you again today—
virtual machine cloning.
In the past, cloning a virtual machine
using Hyper-V Manager really required
over an hour of active, gruelling work from
setting up checkpoints,
sys-prepping your virtual machine,
exporting it, re-importing it back in,
deleting any excess files.
Admin Center really simplifies this entire experience
to just a few clicks.
Here, I am able to give a new name,
select a location,
provide some credentials, and that’s it.
I could choose to sys-prep the VM myself,
or ask Admin Center to sys-prep it for me.
I could go get a cup of coffee while
Admin Center clones this virtual machine for me.
And in the background,
it is doing exactly what you would expect
– it’s sysprepping, exporting it, importing it –
I am going to skip a little bit here,
but in just under 10 minutes,
you will have a new clone ready.
A new cloned VM ready.
Folks, that’s all the demos I have for you today
Download the newest version of Windows Admin Center today
– version 2009 at aka.ms/downloadWAC.
Also, please take a look at these additional videos about
managing Azure Stack HCI using Admin Center
and a very special sneak peek that's in private preview
of using Windows Admin Center right in the Azure portal.
Thanks everyone.