- [Instructor] I'm in my file server, file server one,
and what I'm going to do is I'm going to download
a great utility for management, and monitoring,
and maintaining your servers, called Windows Admin Center.
It is a web based utility that allows us
to manage any computer from a web browser.
I've typed into my search, windows admin center download,
and I get this site from Microsoft
that allow me to download Windows Admin Center.
For safety sake, you want to make sure
that it says microsoft.com, and the certificate
also says it's coming from Microsoft, which it is.
So I'm going to go to the download section,
and go ahead and install.
You need to make sure that you don't have
internet information services on your server already,
because it may cause a port conflict
with port 443 or port 80.
I'll accept the terms and click next.
I'm just going to choose the required data,
and I'm not going to use Microsoft update,
but it's a good idea to do that,
but just for demonstration purposes I won't,
choose the defaults here, click next,
and then you can see you're going to be using
port 443, which is going to be SSL.
So it's going to generate a self-sign certificate,
now that will cause a warning to come up
on most web browsers, but you can also purchase
an SSL certificate, and then you can go ahead
and provide that information there.
Once the installation is complete, it'll give me the option
to open it up from my web browser, and then I'll log in.
Installation is complete, I'm just going to click
on the link and it'll just take me right to it
using my default web browser.
And you may get an initial error saying
that it cannot connect to it, but just give it
a few seconds and then it will pop up.
And now it's prompted me for my username and password,
which I'll enter in.
And now it's launching Windows Admin Center
for the first time.
Now this is just connecting me to the admin center itself,
I don't necessarily have access
to any other servers as of yet.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a look here
at file server one, this is my gateway server,
but it's also the server that I'm on.
This means it's the jumping off point
to connect to other servers.
So I'm going to click on add,
and look at all the different things I can add.
I'm going to start by clicking on add for servers,
and I'll put in the server name.
Now it's doing a search, and typically,
it doesn't accept the credentials that you logged in with,
you usually have to go ahead and type in
the username and password once again.
This is a bug that's been going on for quite a while,
and I don't anticipate it'll be fixed anytime soon.
It says it found the server, so I'll click add,
and there's my server.
I'm going to add again, this time I'm going to add
a little bit different, I'm going to click on add,
and this time I'm going to click on
search active directory.
Click search, and you can see it found it
a little bit faster, so if you have computers
that are either domain controllers or members of the domain,
then it might be a little bit faster to do it that way.
You could also click on import a list,
but I haven't found that to be as fast
or as useful as the other two options.
Now I'm going to click add one last time,
and choose a Windows PC, and that's because
I have a Windows 11 computer.
So I've typed in the client one name,
and now that computer has been added as well.
So I've got all four of my computers.
Now, if I'd like, I can also add in my cluster,
so I'm on a cluster right now,
so if I wanted to add that, my fail over cluster manager
works just fine, so I'm not going to add that here,
it also allows me to add in any Azure virtual machines,
so if I've created any Azure virtual machines,
I can add them, I can even click on create new,
and then add them, as long as I have
an account already set up.
I'm going to click cancel, now that I have all my computers
added in, I'm going to start by clicking on the DC2 server,
it's going to connect to it.
And it's adding in all these different tools
on the left hand side.
Now you can see that I've got some graphical information,
which is very interesting, but we can see
some of the same things that you can open
with the Microsoft management console,
you can open up with Windows Admin Center,
such as certificates.
If I'd like to look at the root certificates,
then I can choose on authroot,
and here's a list of those certificates.
In the overview, you can see that some have expired
and some are healthy, but I have a total of 60 certificates,
and these are all certificates that were added in
during the installation of Windows,
I have yet to add any in myself, with the exception
of my Windows Admin Center, self-signed certificate.
And another example is I can click on firewall,
and here I can manage the firewall by adding in ports,
I can enable firewall rules, or disable them as well.
Here, we see the three different types, the domain,
the private, and the public, by default,
the public is going to have the most amount of blocked ports,
and that's because if you're out in public,
then you want to have the most protection,
whereas if you're in domain or private,
then you actually have more open ports,
because you're in a trusted environment.
However, when you're going to have a domain controller,
it's not going to be out in the public,
so the only one that really matters is going to be the domain.
Now we have incoming and outgoing rules, just as we would
if we went into the Windows Defender Firewall
from a command prompt or from the search box.
And here are all the rules, I can certainly go in
and make changes to those if I need to,
here I can click on a particular rule,
and then I can click on disable if I'd like,
or delete, or make changes to the settings.
I'm going to go back to my Windows Admin Center,
and DC1 is going to look just like DC2,
so I'm going to try clicking on client.
For management, you can add in all your different
clients that are joined to your domain.
And now we see the Windows client
the same way that we saw the server,
although on the left hand side,
there are a lot less tools that you can use.
The Windows Admin Center allows you to manage
any Windows server or client, from any computer
that can access a web browser.