Windows Admin Center is the future of remote server management
designed to modernize and simplify the IT administrator experience.
Today, if I want to perform a management task on a machine,
there are almost 20 different tool I will need to open on
a single machine.
We have consolidated all these tools into a single intuitive
remote server management experience.
Windows Admin Center.
Think of it as the evolution of the traditional “in box” management tools (like MMC).
It’s great for administrators that need a light-weight management solution
for smaller scale deployments or ad-hoc management for large-scale deployments.
Windows Admin Center complements existing tools like System Center,
or Azure Operations Management Suite by providing granular server
management capabilities where Remote Desktop might have been used before.
You can use Windows Admin Center to manage servers, with familiar MMC
tool functionality, traditional failover clusters, where you can easily
get a holistic overview of an entire cluster's resources, hyper-converged
or Azure Stack HCI clusters, with a powerful GUI to manage virtualized
compute, storage, and, networking, and Windows 10 client machines.
Along with managing, Windows Admin Center provides a simple and intuitive
wizard to guide you through deploying Windows Server and Azure Stack HCI
clusters. This multi-stage workflow guides you through installing
features, configuring networking, creating the cluster, and deploying
Storage Spaces Direct or Software-defined networking depending on
your configuration.
Windows Admin Center improves the security of management in your
environment with features like role-based access control and gateway
authentication for local groups, Windows Server Active Directory, or Azure
Active Directory.
We built Windows Admin center with the cloud in mind and Azure integration
is built-in to help you leverage the power of Azure resources from
from your servers whether they're on-premises or in the cloud.
The Azure hybrid services tool consolidates all the integrated Azure services
into a centralized hub where you can easily discover all the available
Azure services that bring value to your on-premise or hybrid environment.
You can also use Windows Admin Center to manage you Azure Virtual
Machine or use a simple wizard to deploy an Azure Virtual Machine
without leaving the tool.
But that’s just the beginning. We’ve built extensibility into the architecture
and have developed an SDK to enable other Microsoft technologies
and 3rd party partners to develop their own solutions that integrate into
Windows Admin Center seamlessly.
At its core, Windows Admin Center is a platform, on top of which we've
built an ecosystem of solutions to manage your server environment.
It is a locally deployed, browser-based solution that consists of two main components.
The first is the gateway, which manages servers via Remote PowerShell
and WMI over WinRM and the second is the web server,
which listens to HTTPS requests and serves the UI to the client web browser.
These components, packed in a single lightweight MSI can be installed
on a Windows 10 client, a dedicated gateway server,
or a managed server giving IT administrators the flexibility to deploy in a way
that makes sense in their unique environment.
By publishing the web server to the public internet, you can connect to
and manage your servers from anywhere.
You can deploy Windows Admin Center in your environment
environment today by visiting aka.ms/WindowsAdminCenter where you can
download the MSI, read more about the features,
and provide your feedback.