Hello, Cloud Gurus,
and welcome back for this lesson
where we're going to take a look at
integrating Windows Admin Center with Azure.
Let's take a look at what we're going to cover.
First up, we'll go over the integration options
that are available to you
when you're integrating Windows Admin Center with Azure,
and then we'll do a demo
of integrating Windows Admin Center
with an Azure Virtual Machine using the Azure portal.
And then we'll take a look
at the Azure hybrid integration options that are available
with Windows Admin Center.
And then finally, we'll do a demo
of configuring Azure hybrid integration
for Windows Admin Center.
All right, let's get started.
Let's first take a look at the methods
for integrating Windows Admin Center with Azure.
The first to be aware of
is that you can now use Windows Admin Center
directly in the Azure portal
to manage a single Azure Virtual Machine.
And Microsoft provides functionality
that will deploy Windows Admin Center as a VM extension
on your VM
and create the necessary network security group rules
to allow you to access the Windows Admin Center website.
You can also deploy Windows Admin Center
to manage multiple servers,
including those on-premises and in Azure.
And you can deploy Windows Admin Center
on-premises or in Azure to do this
provided you have the network connectivity
between your on-premises network and the Azure network.
And you can also use Windows Admin Center
to provide integration with Azure
for a range of Azure hybrid services.
And we'll take a look at these capabilities in more detail
in this lesson.
All right, let's take a look at a demo
of using Windows Admin Center from the Azure portal
to manage a single Azure virtual machine.
And we have a VM named VM1
that we will use to configure Windows Admin Center on.
In this demo, we will configure Windows Admin Center
from the Azure portal
which will deploy the Windows Admin Center VM extension
and configure remote access.
And then we will secure remote access
by configuring the network security group.
And then finally,
we will manage the windows operating system
directly from within the Azure portal.
Let's take a look at the demo.
All right, so here I am in the Azure portal
and I've gone ahead and navigated to VM1
and we're going to deploy Windows Admin Center
on this virtual machine.
So I'll navigate to Windows Admin Center under Settings
and I'm going to select to use the Inbound Port of 6516.
And then I'm going to ask Azure to open this port for me
and I don't need to open an outbound port
for the Windows Admin Center installed
because this VM already has full outbound internet access.
Let's go ahead and click Install.
All right, and this will just take a moment to install
so we'll come back when this is done.
All right, the installation of Windows Admin Center
has been completed on this virtual machine.
Now, before we take a look at Windows Admin Center
from within the Azure portal,
I first want to take a look at the network security
that's been configured for us as part of this install.
So I'm going to navigate to Networking under Settings
and we can see here
we've had a new inbound network security group rule
added for Windows Admin Center.
Now, ideally you'd want to lock down
this inbound network security group rule
to a set of IP addresses that you own,
so that only those IP addresses
can access Windows Admin Center on this virtual machine.
But alternatively to that,
you can also use a private IP address
to connect to Windows Admin Center.
So if you're connecting from a machine
that has internal network access to this virtual machine,
then ideally you could use the private IP address.
Let's take a look at that now.
I'll navigate back to Windows Admin Center under Settings
and now let's take a look at the IP addresses
that we can use to connect to Windows Admin Center.
And we can see here, we have both the private
and the public IP address.
Now, ideally,
for security you'd want to use the private IP address
but because I don't have private access to this VM,
I'm going to go ahead and use the public IP address.
We'll go ahead and hit Connect.
This will just take a moment to connect.
Now we'll just log in with the username and password
for this virtual machine.
All right, and we can see we have access to everything
that we'd normally have access to for our virtual machine
that's managed by Windows Admin Center.
Let's go ahead and try Windows PowerShell.
All right, and we've connected to PowerShell
on this virtual machine.
That wraps up this demo.
Let's continue on.
All right, now let's take a look
at how you can integrate Windows Admin Center with Azure
and what capabilities that unlocks.
There are 2 roles in Windows Admin Center,
administrators and users,
and to integrate Windows Admin Center with Azure
you'll need to be a Windows Admin Center administrator.
And when you integrate with Azure,
you'll also need an Azure ID application
and this can be created automatically
if you have the required permissions
like the Application Administrator role in Azure AD
or you can use an existing Azure AD application
if it has been configured appropriately.
You'll also need Azure RBAC permissions
to access any resources that are created in Azure
by Windows Admin Center.
And Windows Admin Center creates and manages these resources
by impersonating you with your permission.
Once integrated and logged in,
you'll get access to a range of Azure services
including business continuity services like site recovery
and recovery services like Azure backup.
You'll also get access to storage services
like Storage Replica and Azure File Sync
which can replicate data to and from Azure.
And you'll get access to security and compliance services
with Microsoft Defender, formerly Azure Security Center
and you'll get access to Azure policy
and you'll get access to monitoring and alerting
through Azure monitor.
All right, let's take a look at a demo
of configuring Azure integration for Windows Admin Center.
In this demo, we will register our Windows Admin Center
with Azure,
which will create an application in Azure AD
and allow Windows Admin Center
to read the list of users in our Azure AD tenants.
Then we will authorize Windows Admin Center
using our Azure credentials,
which will grant access to Windows Admin Center
to deploy resources on behalf of us.
Let's take a look at the demo.
All right, so here we are
logged onto our administrative server
and we're accessing the Windows Admin Center website
via the URL.
Let's go ahead and configure Azure integration.
To do that, we're going to click Settings
and then under Gateway, we're going to click Register.
And then we'll click Register.
Now we need to authenticate with Azure
so I'm going to go ahead and copy this code
and then we'll log into Azure,
enter the code in,
and that'll authorize Windows Admin Center
to have access to Azure Active Directory.
So we'll go ahead and click Copy,
and then we'll enter the code
and we need to log on with an account
that has access to create an Azure AD application.
So I'm going to log on with an account
that has at least application administrative privileges.
We can go ahead and click Continue.
Now we can go ahead and close this tab.
And now it's discovered our Active Directory tenant ID.
We're going to go ahead
and create a new Active Directory application.
So I'll hit Connect.
And now we need to sign into Azure using our credentials,
so I'll go ahead and click Sign In
and then I'll enter in my credentials.
And now Windows Admin Center is requesting permissions
to act on my behalf.
So I'm going to go ahead and click Accept.
All right, and we're now successfully integrated with Azure.
Now let's go ahead and take a look at the functionality
that is available as part of this integration.
So we'll navigate back to Windows Admin Center.
And we'll navigate to our domain controller
and we'll navigate into the Azure Hybrid Center.
And you can see here
we have a range of Azure services available to us
and we'll be taking a look at a lot of these services
later on in this course
including Azure Arc,
monitoring and security,
Azure File Sync,
extended network,
and Azure Network Adapter.
But that's all we wanted to cover in this demo.
So let's wrap up with a bit of a summary
of what we've covered in this lesson.
All right, so what have we covered in this lesson?
You can deploy the Windows Admin Center
virtual machine extension
to manage Windows Virtual Machines
directly from the Azure portal.
You can also deploy Windows Admin Center on-premises
or in Azure to manage Windows computers
anywhere there is network connectivity,
and you can register Windows Admin Center with Azure
to unlock a range of Azure hybrid services,
including backup, recovery, security, monitoring
and storage services.
All right, thanks for being with me in this lesson
and I hope you found it useful.
And I look forward to seeing you on the next lesson.