I've gone ahead and populated my Windows Admin Center with
all of my different virtual machines,
and now we're going to start working with one of those virtual machines.
I'm going to go ahead and select the domain controller, which is dc1.
I will connect to it by clicking on the domain controller,
and you'll notice on the left‑hand side I am missing
extensions that relate to Active Directory.
This means that I need to go ahead and actually install these extensions.
So I'll navigate to the Settings, and under Extensions, I have Active Directory.
I will select this, and click on Install,
and now Windows Admin Center will go ahead and install this
extension so that I could make use of it.
While that's running,
I'm going to go ahead and install some additional extensions such as DHCP.
I'll do the same for DNS, and I will go ahead and
install the Security (Preview) extension.
Right, so once these extensions have been installed,
let's move back to our domain controller.
And now, on my left‑hand side, I have Active Directory. So
looking at my Active Directory extension,
I have the ability to modify the Users, Groups, OU structure, and I
can also browse the current OU structure of Active Directory. Now
this Active Directory extension is still in Preview mode so I do
not have a lot of functionality that I could use. Essentially, with
this extension,
all I can really do is interact with Active Directory Users and
Computers. If I wanted to configure Group Policies, etc, I would
need to actually remote desktop to the domain controller and work
with those additional tools, or I could also make use of the RSAT
tools on my Windows client.
So as you glance through the different extensions on your left‑hand side,
you'll see that Windows Admin Center provides you with a lot of
functionality that you could use to manage your servers from a
central location. And if you needed to perform some task that is not
listed in the Windows Admin Center,
you can always fall back to PowerShell, which will establish a
PowerShell connection to the domain controller, or you could
establish a Remote Desktop session to the domain controller, and
from the Remote Desktop session, you have full access to the computer that you are managing.