Welcome to Ignite 2021!
We're excited to join you virtually and share all of our exciting new products and updates.
My name is Prasidh Arora and I am a Program Manager on the Azure Edge and Platform team.
Today, I am here to discuss everything that is new with Windows Admin Center,
including our latest generally available release, v2103. Let's get started!
For those of you that are new to Windows Admin Center
I'll just spend a couple minutes talking about Windows Admin Center.
Windows Admin Center is a locally deployed, browser-based management tool that is designed
to be a modern evolution of in-box management tools, like Server Manager and MMC.
It can manage servers all to way back to Windows Server 2012 and up to Windows Server 2019
Azure Stack HCI, and of course Windows Server 2022.
It is quick to install and takes just a few minutes to start managing your first server or cluster.
Admin Center complements existing solutions and is designed to work alongside
existing solutions such as System Center and Azure management
And it's designed to be managed from anywhere.
By installing the Windows Admin center gateway on a server or 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.
Today, we are announcing the general availability of Windows Admin Center version 2103, truly our fastest
and most secure version of Windows Admin Center ever with some fantastic new features
that I am very excited to share with you today.
If you're immediately interested to try it out, go to aka.ms/downloadWAC
right now as you watch this video.
As I have done in many of my previous presentations, I am going to discuss our new
improvements across these 4 pillars with that overarching base of "Deployment" that we have added
over this last year. This presentation will focus mainly on our core management tools, our
Windows Admin Center platform, our hybrid capabilities, our partner ecosystem,
and of course our various deployment flows.
As I go through this presentation, I will also slowly fill up this slide
Alright, let's start with our core management tools.
Windows Admin Center supports installing on and managing the new Windows Server 2022
Preview that was announced this Ignite. As announced in our blog post, this version of Windows Server
comes with advanced multi-layer security, hybrid capabilities with Azure, and a flexible platform to
modernize applications with containers. Try it out!
Furthermore, remote virtual machine management has never been easier with Windows Admin Center and
remains a heavy area of investment for the team. 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 this release of Windows Admin Center
Let's take a quick look.
For those of you that have never used the VM tool in Admin Center, the virtual machine tool
includes High-level Hyper-V host resource monitoring. I can see the number of virtual machines that are
running, 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 event for the Hyper-V host server or entire
cluster in a single dashboard. For those of you interested in learning all about the VM tool in Windows
Admin Center, I have recorded a separate video that goes through all the features.
The link is on the screen.
This release includes a bunch of under the cover improvements and some new features
that just make VM management easier.
Let's start with the ability to add editable columns and groupings. There is a new button up at the
top that allows me to customize your view for each of your servers and clusters. I have this long list of
columns to choose from that gives me any information I would want to know about my virtual
machines. I can select any of these and hit save.
I can also group by any of these columns. In this case, since I am in a cluster view, I will group
by the host name so I know which VMs are running on which of my hosts. We've had a ton of customers
ask us over time to add various columns, so instead, we given you complete ownership of your view
Next, we've also made moving virtual machines even easier. In the past, if you tried to move a virtual
machine that had virtual switches attached to it, it would simply error out. You would have to manually
remove the virtual switches from your virtual machine, move it, and then add them back in after you
move. Not anymore - now, when you're moving your VM, you have a new section that allows you to
pick new virtual switches on your destination making it so easy to move your VM. Windows Admin
Center will take care of the rest!
Lastly, in a continued effort to not only reach parity with Hyper-V manager, but also go much beyond,
we are continuously adding new settings such an integration services and affinity rules. We know virtual
machine management is crucial and will continue to invest in this area with consistent improvements!
Next, in our core management tools, I'm very thrilled to share that we have been working on a
new Events tool. We know that event viewer is a staple for IT admins and customers use this multiple
times in a day to understand better what is going on in their system. As the administrator of Windows
servers and clusters, you deserve the best tools to understand how features, apps, and devices
are working. When you need to troubleshoot or investigate your system, there's no better place
to turn to than the Event Viewer. The classc user interface for Event Viewer was introduced in
1993 and really hasn't changed much since then! So, today I'm excited to share a sneak peak of
what we have been working on.
Over a year ago, we announced a brand new UI to the performance monitor tool and we
received overwhelming positive feedback. We decided to take a similar design paradigm and try out a
redesign of the Events tool. Now, this is still a work in progress, so for now, we have decided to only
show this behind a "Preview" toggle so that your traditional event viewer is still very easy to access. Just
like you can in Performance Monitor, I can now create new workspaces and create different workspaces
81 00:06:40,010 --> 00:06:45,313 for my different needs. I can add events and filter to exactly the kind of events and Event IDs that you
are looking for. I can toggle between two different graph times, whether it is a normal list that we are
used to in the traditional event viewer or a stacked bar graph allowing me to visualize the events that I
have in a new way. I can view multiple events at the same time and of course, save this view to be accessed later at
any time.
This new design is still a work in progress and we will keep improving this experience and adding crucial
missing features over the next few months via extension updates. The original experience will remain unchanged.
: We're also continuously improving accessibility across our product and are striving to make our
product as accessible as possible. That's all for our core management tools!
So I will move on to our Windows Admin Center platform.
We don't generally have a section just discussing new platform updates but
we've made some core improvements this time around that change how you use and update
Windows Admin Center that seemed important to discuss.
This release introduced in-app automatic updates! Ever since our first release 3 years ago,
adoption of each Windows Admin Center release has been incredible with the majority of our customers
joining us as we release each build. However, we've heard from customers that it is a pain to update
Windows Admin Center across all of their gateway installations. From filling out the evaluation center
form, to download, and installing, it can be rather time consuming. Thus, we are finally introducing both
platform and extension automatic updates within the app. Let's take a look.
Now, if I navigate to the gear icon in the top right corner, I will see this new tab for "Updates".
Here you'll see that I have that will automatically update Windows Admin Center a couple of weeks after
it has been released. Similarly, we have a toggle on the "Extensions" page that immediately updates
new extensions as soon as they're available. You no longer have to scroll through this list to get the
latest extension updates, Windows Admin Center will take care of it for you.
For the platform, when there is an update available, you will first see this banner on the landing page
letting you know that an update is available and you will be able to control when this update takes
place. You can choose to update it immediately which will take a couple minutes or you can schedule it
for whenever it is convenient!
This release also introduces Proxy support. We've had so many customers ask us to support
this over the years and it's finally here. You can now redirect all of your Windows Admin Center traffic
over a web proxy. You can download extensions, register to Azure, or redirect all of your outbound
traffic through your custom web proxy.
It's very easy to access too!
Simply go to the gear icon on the top right corner, navigate to
"Proxy" and enter your proxy information! We're excited for all of you to try this out since we know this
has been a widely requested feature from you all.
We've also invested a lot over the last few months to improve performance across the entire
product. We've heard that Windows Admin Center can be sluggish sometimes, especially in when
accessed remotely as a gateway. Amongst a few improvements, our most significant is an upgrade to
HTTP/2. Although I didn't demo this one, you'll notice some significant performance improvements across the product
Furthermore, we've also introduced a pop-out for individual tools in WAC to their own browser.
I've personally been using this a ton for PowerShell and Remote Desktop since I
hate to lose my session for those when I navigate to another tool. We hope you enjoy this too!
Next, let's talk about Built for Hybrid. For years now, Windows Admin Center has been you
bridge to the cloud. We've made it easy to connect your on-premises servers to various Azure Hybrid
Services through the simplicity of our tool. Whether it's using Azure Monitor and Azure Security Center
to monitor alerts for your Windows Server, or simply using Windows Admin Center to manage your
Azure IaaS VMs. We'll we've been investing heavily in this area and I am beyond thrilled to announce
two new improvements.
The first is: Windows Admin Center in the Azure Portal will soon be available in Public Preview!
This new capability allows you to use Windows Admin Center natively in the Azure Portal to manage
your Azure IaaS VMs running Windows Server 2016 or higher. Windows Admin Center in Azure unlocks
incredible capabilities for the Azure Portal by providing you with an interface to manage your Windows
Server VMs. By default, the Azure Portal provides a singular view for VM management and the essential
elements to manage your infrastructure. With the addition of Windows Admin Center, we have
supplemented this great management experience with additional opportunities such as an enhanced
view of VM usage, performance monitoring, viewing of events and much more. This is the same Admin
Center that you know and love.
For those of you that missed it - last Ignite, we announced that this came in Private Preview for
customers to sign up. In our Private Preview, we received some critical feedback and we completely re-
vamped our back-end! While the Windows Admin Center you see in Azure portal is familiar and has
most of the same functionality our Windows Server customers love and use, it is tailored to provide a
cloud-first experience. This is a specially created version of Windows Admin Center which focuses more
on the cloud experience when running IaaS VMs in Azure. Let's take a short demo.
Here I have deployed a Windows Server 2019 VM. Under the capabilities tab or here on the
left, you will see this new TOC item for "Windows Admin Center". For Windows Admin Center in the
Azure Portal, we currently only provide 1:1 management so you do have to install Windows Admin
Center on each virtual machine. So, when you click Install - there are many things that happen in the
background. We install a specially curated version of Windows Admin Center onto your Azure VM, issue
a certificate that is unique to your virtual machine, and create DNS records for your IP addresses that
match your certificate. This integrated certificate experience provides a secure connection supporting
connection over both public and private IP addresses. Now, if I click connect here, I see the same
Windows Admin Center tools that we have been building over the last 3 years that can be used to easily
manage your Azure IaaS VM. We're very excited to have this out there soon and for all of you to try!
I can of course also connect over a Private IP address with the same certificate and DNS records that we had created
Next, we're excited to announce that Windows Admin Center now support Azure IoT Edge for
Linux on Windows. Windows Admin Center is constantly growing it's different connection types. We
introduced Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Stack HCI last year and now, we introduce support for
Azure IoT Edge. Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows allows you to efficiently run containerized Linux
workloads alongside Windows application in production Windows edge deployments. Windows Admin
Center facilitates installation, configuration, and diagnostics of your Azure IoT Edge infrastructure and it
can easily be deployed in just 5 minutes. Let's take a short look.
After you download the new Azure IoT Edge extension, you'll see it under "Add" as a new
connection type. You can click "Create New" and go through the deployment flow in just under 5
minutes. The flow will take you through the download and installation of the Azure IoT package,
configure your host, and setup the curated Linux Virtual Machine for you. It will also connect you to
Azure and that's it - you can begin managing Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows right from Windows
Admin Center. You can download the extension from our public feed today and it only works on the
latest Windows Admin Center release - v2103.
With the announcement of Windows Admin Center in Azure and Azure IoT Edge, that's all we
have for our Hybrid capabilities.
Lastly, I'm going to talk about these two pillars together. There has been a convergence in our
deployment flow as we've had our amazing partners integrating with our Azure Stack HCI deployment
experience making deployment and manage of Azure Stack HCI using Windows Admin Center a much
better experience.
We have some amazing partnerships with Windows Admin Center. Since our last release, this
list has had a new addition, secureguard, so let's give them a warm welcome to the Admin Center family
Microsoft and our partners are focused on empowering the Azure Stack HCI customer to
have a seamless deployment and upgrade experience. Many of our partners and Windows Admin
Center collaborated to provide an integrated firmware and driver update experience allowing users to
get the latest updates to keep your Azure Stack HCI deployment. Administrators now have to spend less
time worrying about OS and hardware updates and instead, can perform both of these updates in a
single workflow - all through Windows Admin Center. Whether these are updates that must be
performed while deploying your Azure Stack HCI cluster using the Admin Center cluster creation
workflow, or updates that come later as part of Cluster-Aware Updates. These snap-in extensions, as we
call them, are being developed by many of our partners and I am very excited to show you a demo from
the Dell. As Talal, on our senior directors put it, "This innovative solution provides value and flexibility to
accelerate your edge computing journey even further."
This demo is from the Windows Admin Center Azure Stack HCI cluster deployment workflow.
There is a new step here, step 1.6, where I can go through the workflow that Dell has curated. Dell's
experience takes me through 6 steps where they check various aspects of your infrastructure before
finally installing the updates in the last step. As more of our partners build these snap-in extensions,
each hardware will have their own experience for installing hardware updates while deploying Azure
Stack HCI.
Lastly, we've also had many partners such as HPE, DataON, and QCT, release new versions of
their extensions that can be used to manage your hardware. All of these extensions can be found within
Windows Admin Center extensions page.
That's all we have for Windows Admin Center v2103. We have a ton of new updates and we're excited
for all of you to try it out. Go ahead and download Windows Admin Center v2103 by going to
aka.ms/downloadWAC or try out Windows Admin Center in the Azure Portal as soon as it's released by
visiting the Azure Portal and deploying or managing your already deployed Windows Server Azure IaaS VM
And of course, we always love to hear from you, please continue to give us feedback by visiting
aka.ms/wacfeedback and giving us feedback over User Voice. Follow us on Twitter @servermgmt to
always stay up to date on extension updates or anything we release in between our big generally
available releases. Email us questions at wacchat@microsoft.com. Or if you're interested in building a
new extension, don't hesitate to contact us by visiting aka.ms/extendwac.
That's all I have for you today folks. Thank you so much for watching this video and attending Ignite
2021. We're excited for you to try out our new releases and we're looking forward to your feedback.