Before we dive into the demonstrations of Windows Admin Center,
let's spend a couple of minutes talking about what
exactly the Windows Admin Center is.
The Windows Admin Center is a browser‑based app that can be used for
managing Windows servers, your hyper‑converged infrastructure, as
well as Windows PCs. The great thing about this product is that it is
free to use for production use.
You can think of the Windows Admin Center as a modern
version of the "inbox" management tools.
For example,
you may already be familiar with tools such as Server
Manager in the Microsoft management console.
Windows Admin Center performs a similar role to those tools.
Remember that this is not a replacement for System Center, but
rather it's a complement to the System Center suite.
Now there are a couple of scenarios where Windows Admin Center would fit in,
the first being the simplification of server management.
It allows you to manage your servers and clusters in a modernized way.
The Windows Admin Center can be installed in a little under 5 minutes and
allows you to manage your servers almost immediately.
When you think of hybrid solutions, the integration with Azure helps you to
optionally connect your on‑premise servers with the relevant cloud services
that is offered within Azure hybrid services.
You can also leverage the Windows Admin Center for any
type of hyperconverged management.
It allows you to streamline your management of your Azure stack or your
Windows Server hyperconverged clusters, enabling you to simplify your
workloads to create and manage virtual machines, Storage Spaces Direct
volumes, software‑defined networking, and more.
Now,
Windows Admin Center supports four deployment types,
or rather, installation types.
The first being the simplest,
which is the local client. This is the installation type that I
will be using in this course. Essentially, it's the Windows Admin
server installed on a local Windows 10 client that you can connect
to and manage your servers.
The next installation type that you have is the gateway server.
This enables you to install on a designated gateway server where you can
access the Windows Admin Center from essentially any client browser that
has connectivity to the gateway server.
Then you've got the managed server installation type.
This allows you to install the app directly on a managed server for the
purpose of remotely managing the server or a cluster.
This is great when you want to leverage Windows Admin
Center in distributed scenarios.
The final installation type is the failover cluster. Here you can
deploy in a failover cluster to enable high availability of the
Windows Admin Center gateway service.
This is a good deployment method if you want to leverage it
in a production environment whereby you ensure resiliency
of your management servers.
So now let's look at some of the demonstrations where we will be working with Windows Admin Center to perform various tasks.