>> Welcome, everyone to the Windows Server Summit.
We're excited to have all of you here today.
Building on Jeff's top 10 things to do with Windows Server,
Amber and I are here to talk about the great innovations we have
done with Windows Admin Center in our last couple of releases.
I am Prasidh Arora and I'm joined here by Amber Guo,
and we're both Program Managers on the Windows Admin Center team.
For those of you that have never heard of Admin Center and are
missing out on the awesomeness that is this server management tool,
I want to give a quick introduction to it.
Windows Admin Center is
a locally deployed browser-based management tool
designed to be the modern evolution of
inbox management tools like Server Manager or MMC.
It can manage servers all the way back to Windows Server
2012 and all the way up to Windows Server 2019,
Azure Stack HCI, and,
of course, Windows Server vNext.
It is quick to install and takes
just a few minutes to start managing your first server or cluster.
An Admin Center is really designed to complement existing tools
and to work alongside System Center or Azure management.
It's designed to be managed from absolutely anywhere by installing
the Windows Admin Center gateway on a server or
a Windows 10 machine and
publishing your gateway to the public Internet.
You can connect to and manage
your server from anywhere, all in a secure way.
Lastly, Admin Center is built to be your bridge to the Cloud.
Our Azure hybrid services are a cornerstone to connecting
your on-prem servers to Azure in a seamless and efficient manner.
We're continuously building on all of
our core tools with our announcement of
Windows Admin Center v2009,
just last month at Ignite.
This is truly our fastest and most secure version of Admin Center,
about 30 percent faster than any of our previous releases.
We have built-in support for Azure Stack HCI
and Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Stack HCI.
All this goodness can be installed right now at aka.ms/WACdownload.
Last year, for those of you that attended our session
at the Server Summit or at Ignite,
we outlined four large pillars
that we would be focusing on as a product.
Our core management tools,
Windows Server Role Management,
built for hybrid, and our partner ecosystem.
We continue to invest in these core pillars
and introduce more features with every release.
However, we've realized that so much of our team's investment over
the past few months has really
not been on one of these four pillars.
But instead, something that spans across all of these,
it's a precursor, a base, if you will.
The cluster deployment base.
Before using any of these tools that we have built
for Windows Admin Center to manage your servers or clusters,
we're providing intuitive and simple workflows
to deploy these clusters.
This presentation will touch on all four pillars and our base,
as we will slowly fill up this slide and
talk about each of these core topics.
Let's start talking about Windows Server Role Management.
Since most people here are managing workloads with clusters,
let's start with talking about what people
do when it comes to cluster management.
Here, I have a two-node cluster and I want to show you
just the value and
elegance we have brought with Windows Admin Center.
This, as I connect to here,
Contoso HCI is a two-node cluster with eight total drives,
just 37 virtual machines,
18 of which are running.
Even with two nodes,
you can just see how powerful you can deliver an HCI system.
An 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 machine 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,
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 IO performance metrics,
virtual machine health alerts,
and events for the Hyper-V host server
or the entire cluster in a single dashboard.
Of course, I'm going to be spending most of
my time here looking at the inventory page.
Admin Center brings a unified experience,
bringing in Hyper-V Manager and
Failover Cluster Manager capabilities together.
I can view all of the virtual machines running across by cluster,
and if I want, drill down into
a single virtual machine
for advanced management and troubleshooting.
Of course, given the importance of
managing your virtual machine for clusters,
we're constantly building on
new Hyper-V management in Windows Admin Center.
But first, although very simple,
yet very useful change we made is a new drop-down menu.
We realize that as we kept growing our management tools,
searching through this long list got very cumbersome.
We did some research and grouped these tasks accordingly.
As we continue to add new features,
these individual drop-downs will start growing.
Next, I want to talk about
our most requested feature for
the VM tool, Live Storage Migration.
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.
Just as Hyper-V or Failover Cluster Manager did,
Live Storage Migration and Admin Center allows for
redistributing due to new storage capabilities,
defragmenting the VM storage space,
migrating from local storage to network storage,
and many other capabilities that are common to IT administrators.
This task takes just a few button clicks in Admin Center,
whether it is moving all your storage to
one location or splitting it across various locations.
Next is the Admin Center version 2009.
We're bringing some new capabilities to manage
the actual operating system of your Virtual Machine.
Let's start with giving many people
access to your virtual machine 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 you to
RDP and navigate to the actual VM,
and go to computer settings,
join domain, and give other users access to that.
Not anymore. By entering your domain and some credentials,
Admin Center will join
your running virtual machines to
a domain making it easy to manage.
Of course, this often requires
a restart which Admin Center will take care of too.
This actually leads us right into our next feature,
managing a VM with normal 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 difference
between OSS with or without a GUI.
You are now able to manage your VM using
standard Windows Admin Center tools
right from within the inventory page.
Truly bringing complete granular management configuration,
troubleshooting, and maintenance functionality
to your VMs running on-prem.
As you can see here, the VM is actually
joined to the Redmond domain, just as we did before.
I have all these running better Admin Center tools at my disposal.
Now although, I wish I had all the time to demo
all the new features we've had for the VM tool.
There's two quick ones I do want to mention,
that I can't just demo here.
The first is VM cloning.
This task that would take over
an hour of work using Hyper-V Manager,
can be done in just two button clicks in Windows Admin Center.
The second is a new UI for affinity and anti-affinity rules,
that is new to Azure Stack HCI clusters
and of course Windows Server vNext clusters.
Next, since we're talking about managing clusters,
let's talk about the improvements we've
made to Cluster-Aware updates.
While we've made incremental progress to improve the CAU tool,
our biggest and most exciting feature is providing
an integrated OEM update experience along
with Microsoft Windows Updates for Azure Stack HCI clusters.
Now when I'm using
the update flow to update our clusters, there is a new step.
Step 2, where our OEM partners are building snap in
extensions to allow users to
update their hardware from within Admin Center.
For now we have this dummy screen,
but our partners are actively working to release their extensions
to bring in these hardware updates part of Admin Center.
That's all we have for Windows Server
Role Management and I'll pass it
over to Amber to talk about our core management tools.
>> Thanks, Prasidh. Hi everyone.
I'm Amber and I'll be talking about
the updates to our core management tools.
First, we've really several new
update server containers extension tool,
including experiences around installing
the containers rule in Docker,
as well as experiences around pulling images, creating new images,
and pushing images to remote private registries
such as Azure Container Registry.
To walk through the experience,
starting on the images tab,
there's now the option to create a new container image.
This experience makes building new container images easy.
From here, users can configure
specifics about the image they would like to create.
Users can create images from Static Web Application Folders,
Visual Studio Solutions or Web Deploy zip files.
Building an image from a Web Deploy file
was our newest update to the image creation experience.
Know a selected based on user feedback.
We are aiming to expand these options over time.
To build from Web Deploy,
users can select the zip file framework
and specify their image name and tag.
From here they can see a Docker file preview.
It provides transparency to the image construction process.
Once the image is created,
the new image appears in the images tab.
Users can run this image locally from this tab,
which can be viewed on the Containers tab.
Now the app is running locally on the host.
Users can also push this image to
Azure Container Registry to be pulled down or run elsewhere.
We also have new updates to our file shares tool.
The File Shares tool has been moved out of
the storage tool and into the files and file sharing tool,
making it more accessible for users to find.
Users can also configure advanced settings,
share permissions in access based modes.
Users can also select to remove shares,
which brings them to the File Share Settings page.
Here, users can remove shares
and also configure additional settings.
This covers our core management tool updates.
You've also probably noticed
a new color scheme from the walk throughs and demos so far.
This was to give our core product a refreshed user experience.
Moving on Windows Admin Center has also
updated cluster deployment experiences.
Deploying server clusters is challenging for many reasons.
There are complex deployment scripts with
each scenario requiring
unique deployment in troubleshooting procedures.
Additionally, following best practices
is essential for good performance.
Windows Admin Center is making cluster deployment easy with
a simple wizard that incorporates best practices by design.
This wizard covers multiple cluster types,
as well as a broad hardware ecosystem.
One core cluster deployment experience
is that for Azure Stack HCI.
New updates to this experience include
changes to networking as well as
experiences to easily register
your Azure Stack HCI cluster to Azure.
Windows Admin Center also has a new experience
for Azure Kubernetes service on Azure Stack HCI.
AKS on Azure Stack HCI is
a new on-premise Kubernetes
offering from Microsoft that is secure,
easy to deploy, and consistent with Azure.
The new Windows Admin center experience provides wizards to set up
a new AKS host on an Azure Stack HCI environment.
Once this host is set up,
users can deploy new Kubernetes clusters
to the AKS host environment,
enabling Azure Arc experiences and connectivity by default.
More information on AKS on
Azure Stack HCI is available in another session.
This wraps up or updates to
cluster deployment. Back to you, Prasidh.
>> That's awesome. Thanks, Amber.
Let's talk about our partner ecosystem.
Admin Center was designed to be extensible,
whether it's Teams within Microsoft building their own extensions
or our OEM partners building
new extensions to make hardware management easier.
We have some amazing partners that are
committed to updating and building their extensions.
We're thrilled that we have
so many new and update extension
that came as part of this release.
We have one new extension from Dell and two new from HPE.
We also have four extensions that have received new updates.
One from DataOn, one from Dell,
one from HPE and one from QCT.
Building new extensions in Admin Center
is easy and we encourage everyone,
not just our OEM partners that are looking for
new features or see some features missing in Windows Admin Center,
to build their own extension and
e-mail us to host it on our public feed.
Visit aka.ms/extendWAC to learn more.
Now the last box that we haven't talked about
just yet is built for hybrid.
We have some very exciting new things to announce here.
Windows Admin Center has been
designed to be your bridge to the Cloud.
We've built simple, intuitive and fast workflows to connect
your on-premises server to Azure using tools such as Azure Backup,
Monitor, Site Recovery, and much more.
We've built so many integrations that we have a tool
within each server to help you
keep track of your hybrid connections.
But our most exciting announcement is
the introduction of Windows Admin Center to the Azure portal.
Those same server management tools that you know and love are
now available for you to use to manage your Azure IaaS VMs,
without ever having to leave the Azure portal.
This new feature will be available as a VM extension for free
to all Azure VMs running Windows Server 2016 and 2019.
Since this will be on Azure,
it will be kept up to date with our latest and greatest features.
You won't have to wait for
our six month release cycle to get our latest features.
We announced this to private preview last month at Ignite.
We've got a ton of feedback that we're working to address
from support for private IP addresses and much more.
We plan to released a public preview soon.
So stay tuned. Jeff Woolsey,
will be talking about this more later today.
Folks, that's all we have for
new innovations with Windows Admin Center.
As always, please continue to give us
feedback using UserVoice and follow us on
Twitter @servermgmt to keep up-to-date with our latest news.
Thank you all for joining,
and I'm going to pass it over to Ryan Puffer.