Windows Admin Center.
What is Windows Admin Center?
Why do you care?
Well, to set the stage, first of all, recall that in Windows Server,
for quite a few years, as a matter of fact,
we've had Server Manager as our main line graphical user
interface multi‑server management tool.
Works fine.
It's okay,
I mean you can install it on your client machine as part of
the remote server administration tools,
but nowadays we're in a cross‑platform world more than ever before,
aren't we?
I mean, Microsoft has their own Linux distribution for use in Azure,
for heaven's sake.
The Server Manager tool is a Windows only .NET Framework desktop application,
so yes, it's available on domain controllers and yes,
as I said, it's part of the RSAT tool set,
and that's great and wonderful if you're on Windows,
but that's not the case for everybody.
I have plenty of friends and colleagues who use a macOS
computer as their primary work station.
What do we have to help manage Windows Server in that environment?
Are we going to do virtual machines?
Well, you can, but you don't have to.
Nowadays we have Windows Admin Center, also called WAC.
This is a browser‑based multi‑server management tool that is
available cross‑platform. Microsoft officially supports it on
Edge and Google Chrome browsers.
One thing to keep in mind, Windows Admin Center is not available on
domain controllers, so you can install it on your member servers, and
in that case, the servers will be Windows Admin Center gateways, where
you can connect centrally, multiple users can connect to the same
instance of WAC, or you can install it as a singleton instance on your
client device.
Under the hood, as I mentioned,
Windows Admin Center uses PowerShell Windows Management
Instrumentation, or WMI, and then WinRM is the Windows Remote
Management service that underlies PowerShell remoting. There's a
couple important AZ‑800 exam alerts that I have governing Windows
Admin Center, and I'd like to do that in demo, so let's do that next.