#windowsadmincenter

Windows Admin Center Preview 1908 released. You’ll start to see visual changes in this version as minor style updates to the Windows Admin Center UI, including a new, rich, entry page to the add connection experience:

Other changes include: NEW TOOL! Packetmon: Packetmon is a new feature that will allow you to diagnose your server by capturing and displaying network traffic through the networking stack in a log that is filtered, organized, and easy to follow and manipulate. This release of Packetmon supports 19H1 and 19H2 builds. In later releases, Windows Server 2019 will be supported, the actual names of networking stack components will be displayed in the log, users will be able to filter the log by components & dropped packets, and users will be able to save captures to analyze and manipulate the captures whenever needed. NEW TOOL! FlowLog Audit: Flowlog auditing is a new capability for the SDN firewall in Windows Server 2019. When you enable SDN firewall, any flow processed by SDN firewall rules (ACLs) that have logging enabled gets recorded. These logs can be used for diagnostics or archived for later analysis. With the new “Flowlog Audit” extension in Windows Admin Center, you can easily manage, search and filter the SDN logs for analysis and diagnostics. It can be difficult to gain insights into flow logging data by manually searching the log files. In this extension, you can also upload the log to Azure Blob, then use Power BI to visualize your most recent flow logs and learn about traffic on your network.

UPDATED TOOL! Security: Install or update the Security tool from the extension feed. This update features a full visual refresh with the ability to toggle real-time Windows Defender protection, run a quick scan, modify your scan schedule, view history and edit default remediation actions. Windows Admin Center can now onboard Failover Cluster and Hyper-Converged Cluster connections to Azure Monitor: To configure Azure Monitor for your cluster, navigate to Settings -> Monitoring Alerts. The onboarding process will help set up the log analytics workspace in Azure and install the appropriate local agents on each server in your cluster to help you collect events and performance counters for analysis, reporting, and alerting. Windows Admin Center extension developers: The Active Directory search that was originally implemented for adding servers is now a reusable control – the link to the example is: https://localhost:6516/devguide/tools/active-directory-search-control WinRM over HTTPS: Supporting WinRM over HTTPS (port 5986) is a top user request. Starting in this version of Windows Admin Center, you will have the option to choose WinRM over HTTPS (port 5986) as the method of connection to your managed nodes.

Known issues

Windows Admin Center (WAC) – это новый инструмент удаленного управления серверами, которое осуществляется с помощью обычного браузера.

Windows Admin Center Preview 1903 released. Extension notifications To help make extension discovery and update easier, we’ve added the following features: Notification will appear when you connect to a server/cluster and there is an extension available that supports the hardware manufacturer and model. Information for implementing this in the extension package will be provided to our extension developer partners and you will start seeing these notifications as partners update their extensions in the future. In the next release, we plan to provide an option to turn off these notifications if the user chooses. Notification will appear if you open a tool/extension and an update for the extension is available to install. (Known issue: In desktop mode, the notification will tell you to contact your gateway admin to install the update, and this will be fixed in an upcoming release.) New tool – Active Directory After installing the Active Directory extension from the extension feed, the tool will appear when you connect to a server that is a domain controller. In this version of the tool, you can: View domain details such as DNS root, forest, and domain mode Create users, configure basic user properties, and group memberships Create groups and manage membership Search for users, computers, and groups (search limited to 10 of each type in this release) View details pane for users, computers, and groups Enable/disable, and remove user or computer objects Reset user passwords Configure resource-based constrained delegation on a computer object. New tool – DNS After installing from the extension feed, the DNS tool will appear when your server is configured as a DNS server. In this version of the DNS tool, you can: View details of DNS Forward Lookup zones, Reverse Lookup zones and DNS records Create Forward Lookup zones in different types (primary, secondary and stub), configure Forward lookup zone properties like master servers, dynamic update, zone file location, etc. Create Host (A or AAAA), CNAME or MX type of DNS records, configure DNS records properties such as FQDN, TTL, etc. Create IPV4 and IPV6 Reverse Lookup zones in different types (primary, secondary and stub), configure reverse lookup zone properties like Network ID, zone file name and location, Master Servers, etc. Create PTR, CNAME type of DNS records under reverse lookup zone, configure DNS records properties such as HOST IP Address, FQDN, TTL, etc.

New tool – DHCP

After installing from the extension feed, the DHCP tool will appear when your server is configured as a DHCP server. In this version of the tool, you can: View IPV4 and IPV6 scope details such as IP distribution status, usage of IP addresses, address exclusions and address reservations. Create IPV4 and IPV6 scopes, configure scopes properties such as IP address range, Router, lease duration of DHCP client and Activate/Deactivate IPV4/IPV6 scopes Create address exclusions and configure start and end IP address Create address reservations and configure client MAC address (IPV4), DUID and IAID (IPV6)

Azure Monitor

Our #1 UserVoice request was to enable email notifications from Windows Admin Center. Now, with the added integration with Azure Monitor, you can configure custom email notifications about your server health, using the robust alerting framework of Azure Monitor. With Azure Monitor’s free 5 GB of data per month/customer allowance, you can easily try this out for a server or two without worry of getting charged. Read on to see additional benefits of onboarding servers into Azure Monitor, such as getting a consolidated view of systems performance across the servers in your environment. Set up your server for use with Azure Monitor, coming this week! Note: We are releasing this feature with Windows Admin Center Preview 1903 to Windows Insiders today, however there is a pending API update in Azure that is not rolled out yet. The feature will not be functional end-to-end until the update in Azure is live by the end of the week, March 29th. From the Overview page of a server connection, click the new button “Manage alerts”, or go to Server Settings > Monitoring and alerts. Within this page, onboard your server to Azure Monitor by clicking “Set up” and completing the setup pane. Admin Center takes care of provisioning the Azure Log Analytics workspace, installing the necessary agent, and ensuring the VM insights solution is configured. Once complete, your server will send performance counter data to Azure Monitor, enabling you to view and create email alerts based on this server, from the Azure portal. Create email alerts Once you’ve attached your server to Azure Monitor, you can use the intelligent hyperlinks within the Settings > Monitoring and alerts page to navigate to the Azure Portal. Admin Center automatically enables performance counters to be collected, so you can easily create a new alert by customizing one of many pre-defined queries, or writing your own. Get a consolidated view across multiple servers If you onboard multiple servers to a single Log Analytics workspace within Azure Monitor, you can get a consolidated view of all these servers from the Virtual Machines Insights solution within Azure Monitor. Note that only the Performance and Maps tabs of Virtual Machines Insights for Azure Monitor will work with on-premises servers – the health tab functions only with Azure VMs. To view this in the Azure portal, go to Azure Monitor > Virtual Machines (under Insights), and navigate to the “Performance” or “Maps” tabs. Visualize apps, systems, and services connected to a given server When Admin Center onboards a server into the VM insights solution within Azure Monitor, it also lights up a capability called Service Map. This capability automatically discovers application components and maps the communication between services so that you can easily visualize connections between servers with great detail from the Azure portal. You can find this by going to the Azure portal > Azure Monitor > Virtual Machines (under Insights), and navigating to the “Maps” tab. Note: The visualizations for Virtual Machines Insights for Azure Monitor is currently supported for the following Azure regions only: East US, West Central US, West Europe, and Southeast Asia. You must deploy the Log Analytics workspace in one of these regions to get the additional benefits provided by the Virtual Machines Insights solution described above.

Known issues

Windows Admin Center Preview 1902 released.

Shared connections

We’re excited to release a highly-requested feature: a single connection list that can be shared across all users of a WAC gateway. To add servers, clusters, and PCs as shared connections, you must be a WAC gateway administrator. Go to WAC Gateway Settings > Shared Connections, and then add servers, clusters, and PC as you normally would. You can tag servers in this pane as well, and these tags will appear for all users. The tags are immutable from the home “All Connections” page, meaning WAC users cannot change tags on shared server connections.

Software Defined Networking (SDN)

New Tool – Access Control List management (SDN) With SDN, you can use access control lists (ACLs) to manage data traffic flow using Datacenter Firewall and ACLs on virtual subnets. You can enable and configure Datacenter Firewall rules by creating ACLs that get applied to a virtual subnet. New Tool – Gateway Connection (SDN) SDN Gateway is a software-based, multitenant, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) capable router designed for Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and Enterprises that host multiple tenant virtual networks using Hyper-V Network Virtualization. In the Gateway Connection tool, you can manage and monitor your gateway connections in an SDN environment. It supports all three types of gateway connections – IPSEC, GRE and L3.

New Tool – Logical Network Management (SDN)

VM networks are abstract objects that act as an interface to logical networks. In a virtualized network environment, by using the VM networks, you can abstract virtual machines from the underlying logical network. In the Logical Network tool, you can manage and monitor your logical network.