

It will also give you the option to generate a self-signed SSL certificate that will expire in 60 days or to use an SSL certificate already installed on the computer.įull access to system settings like the firewall make it possible to enable specific rules for functions like remote desktop (see Figure 2). The installation program will ask you to select a port for the web interface (see Figure 1). If your system doesn’t have WMF 5.0 or later installed, you can download and install it here. Windows Admin Center is based on Windows PowerShell and requires the Windows Management Framework version 5.0 or higher to be installed on all managed systems. Full documentation can be found on the Microsoft Docs website.

You can even connect to the gateway from off-premises by publishing the web server to DNS and properly configuring the corporate firewall. Windows Admin Center combines a web server and gateway to connect to multiple systems over WinRM. As of this writing, the latest version is 2103. To get started we will go over how to install and setup Windows Admin Center. How to Install and Setup Windows Admin Center

Microsoft has definitely seen the value of utilizing the portability of modern web applications to solve the problem of managing servers and has implemented it quite well in Windows Admin Center. While this capability works great within the corporate firewall, it can also be extended to allow remote access should that be required.

All communication happens via Remote PowerShell and WMI. Windows Admin Center will manage Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2012. This tool was originally known as Project Honolulu but Microsoft renamed it Windows Admin Center and made it generally available in 2018. To help ease of use, traditional server management tools from Microsoft have utilized the standard user interface presented by other Windows applications. Windows Admin Center is a browser-based management tool from Microsoft that delivers functionality similar to the Azure -based Server Management Tools, a service that was retired at the end of June 2017 only to have many of the same capabilities resurrected in Windows Admin Center.
