Windows Admin Center, your favorite server management tool, is now available to use natively in the
Azure Portal in preview. This new capability enables seamless and granular management of your
Windows Server Azure IaaS Virtual Machines from within the Azure Portal. Windows Admin Center in
Azure unlocks incredible capabilities for the Azure Portal by providing you with an interface to manage
the actual operating system of your Windows Server VMs. Let's take a look at how to set this up.
Here, I am connected to a Windows Server 2019 virtual machine. Here, under the capabilities tab, I see
this new box for Windows Admin Center or on the left, I see a new TOC blade item under "Settings".
Note that this blade will only show up if your VM is running Windows Server 2016 or higher. Navigating
to this blade will bring me to an install screen.
Windows Admin Center in the Azure Portal is tailored to provide you with a cloud-first experience. This
means that unlike our on-premises version of Admin Center, you don't have to worry about provisioning
a certificate or DNS records for your instances of Admin Center - we take care of all of that for you.
Windows Admin Center has a backend service that is running that automates the provision and
management of a certificate for each of your instances of Windows Admin Center in the Azure Portal.
Your VM must have access to this service at all times for Admin Center to function. So, similar to many
other services in Azure, if you have blocked all outbound traffic for your virtual machine, you must
create an outbound port rule for the IP address of the Admin Center service. The details are also
provided in our documentation and very soon, we will also support Service Tags.
Now, that the outbound port rule has been created, you can navigate back to the install screen and click "Install".
If you wish to connect to your instance
of Windows Admin Center over a public IP address, you will also need to open up an inbound port rule for
the port on which you install Admin Center. This can easily be done by selecting a check-box on the install
screen. Note that this rule is very similar to one that you would need to RDP into your VM. Installation
takes about 5 minutes. In the background, we are issuing your VM and certificate and DNS records
for each of the IP addresses on your VM.
as well as installing a specially curated version of Windows Admin Center onto your virtual machine
Windows Admin Center will take care of keeping your certificate and DNS records
always up to date. Also note, for Windows Admin Center in the Azure Portal, we do support the "gateway"
model of Admin Center. For now, you must install Admin Center on each of the virtual machines you wish to manage
Once installation is complete, you can select the IP address you wish to connect over depending on your
networking configuration and the Vnet your instance of the Azure Portal is running. Connecting will
require you to enter your VM's admin credentials and Windows Admin Center will begin to load.
Now, every time you wish to open Windows Admin Center,
all you have to do is navigate to the blade and whether you wish to connect over a public or private IP address, you will be able to connect.
Windows Admin Center provides a large set of management tools that have been built over many years.
You can monitor your expired certificates
, manage your files
, view your performance
view critical events,
use PowerShell,
use an in-browser RDP session and so much more directly from the Azure Portal.
To learn more, visit aka.ms/WACinAzure or visit the Azure Portal today to try this out!