- [Narrator] Windows Admin Center is a comprehensive
monitoring and maintenance tool that can connect
§to on-premises servers, clients, clusters,
and Azure virtual machines.
Within a Windows server,
you can just go down to the start button
and click on that, choose all apps
and you can see that Windows Admin Center,
the installation tool is already built in
to the start menu in Windows Server 2025.
If you're not a Windows Server 2025, you can go ahead
and download it from microsoft.com.
So I'll click on Windows Admin Center setup,
and a new wizard shows up.
I'm going to click next and you can see
it's going to download everything it needs
in order to get started.
You can install this on any Windows server
or Windows 10 or 11 client.
Now I don't recommend you install it on any server
that's running internet information services
as a web server host
because then you'll have an issue with the ports
because this particular program likes to use Port 443,
although you can change it if you'd like to.
And web servers also like to use that for SSL connectivity.
We can also install a public certificate
and connect to this from outside
of our local area network if we'd like
by Port Forwarding 443
or whatever port you're using
into the Windows Admin Center server,
the latest installer's bin downloaded,
so I can go ahead and click install
and it will install Windows Admin Center on the server.
While we're waiting, I'm going to go ahead
and join this Windows 11 computer
into the active directory domain.
First, I need to set up the IP address settings
to be able to make sure
that it's pointing the DNS to .150,
otherwise I won't be able to communicate with the domain.
And here you can see that the DNS server is set to 150.
If not, you can click edit and make that change.
Once that's done, you can click on System and inside System,
we can go to about, just like we did on File Server one
and then join this computer to the domain the same way.
I'll click on Domain
or Work Group, click on change,
and type in the name of the domain
and I'll get prompted for the username and password
and I'm welcomed into the domain.
Of course, I'll have to restart,
but before I do that,
in order to be added into Windows Admin Center
and to be properly monitored, I'm going to need
to go into the firewall.
So I'm going to go to Firewall
and choose Windows Defender Firewall.
I'll click on Inbound Rules
and I want to go to the WMI rule.
That's Windows Management Instrumentation
and I want to make sure that it's enabled.
So I'll just go ahead and select
all these different ones and choose Enable.
And I also want to go down to the Windows remote management
as well and enable all those,
that will allow us to remotely manage any particular device.
And it could be a server as well.
If you can't connect to any servers,
just by going into Windows Admin center
and adding in that client
or server that you'd like to add in.
Now that that's done, I can go ahead and close this
and I can restart my client computer
and it'll be joined to the domain
and I'm back on my server installing Windows Admin Center.
I'll accept the terms, click next.
It is going to create and use a self sign certificate.
Now you're going to get a warning
or an error when you open up your browser the first time
to go into this
because it's not using a trusted certificate,
but that's okay.
Everything will still work
and you can add a trusted certificate later on.
I'm going to choose the express setup
and click next, generate a new self-signed certificate.
I'll update automatically from Microsoft
and choose install.
Once it's done, a new shortcut
to Windows Admin Center will show up.
You click on that and log in.
Installation completed, and I'm going to go ahead and start it.
It's going to open using the default web browser
and you can also see the shortcut
that's on the desktop as well.
Here's the warning I mentioned earlier
because it's not a trusted certificate,
so it'll just tell it to continue on.
And now log in to Windows admin center
and I'll click to sign in.
And when it launches, it's going to go ahead
and add in the server that you're logged into.
In this case, I'm in File Server one.
It also says this is the Gateway.
So basically what that means is I can log into
this particular server's website
and from there, I can bounce to many other servers
and clients as well.
So now I'm going to add in another server,
but we also have the option to add in Windows PCs,
Azure virtual machines and server clusters.
So if you've installed Failover Cluster Manager
and configured it, or you'd like to create a new one here,
you need to have at least a couple
of different servers called server nodes
as well as shared storage to be able to create the cluster.
And that creates highly available applications.
Also, take a look in the upper right hand corner,
it's updating extensions.
Extensions are just the ability
to add in additional services roles
and features that have been installed
into the servers that you're adding in.
So for instance, if you have DNS installed on a server,
then you can go ahead
and add the DNS extension to be able to manage it.
I'm going to click on adding a server,
and then on the right hand side you're going to see the prompt
for the server name I'm going to add in DC2,
it's going to search for it, it found the server.
You can also import a list if you have a lot
of different servers and clients to add in,
or just search active directory
if you can't find it any other way.
So I'll click add
and we also got a message about it
adding the updated extension so I can click okay on that.
And now we can see both DC2 and file server one.
From file server one, I'm going to click on DC2,
it's going to connect
and it's going to show me a lot of different tools.
So if I'm already linked into Azure,
it's going to show me some Azure utilities
such as Azure backup, file sync, things like that.
But if I'm not connected into Azure, then I can go ahead
and manage some of these other utilities
to help maintain and monitor my server.
For instance, let's go down to Performance Monitor.
So from File Server one, I can see
how DC2 is doing in many different areas.
I'm going to choose to add a counter.
So I've got lots of different options here.
Once everything loads up, you can click on Object
and there's all these different counters
that I can check on.
I'm going to scroll down
just to show you all the different ones.
And I'm going to choose the processor.
I'm going to choose to select all processors,
and now I can choose the counter type.
So underneath each one of these objects
are various different counters.
Now you don't necessarily want to have all of them
just because it could end up taking a long time
to get all that information to load up,
but you can choose whichever ones make the most sense.
So for instance, I'm going to choose interrupt time
as well as privilege time,
and I can choose the type of graph.
So right now we're looking at a report.
So it's not quite as interesting sometimes as say,
looking at a line a max, a heat map,
but you're not going to see all the different options
in every instance.
There's lots more things on the left hand side
that we can click on in order to find out
about what's going on with our server.
For instance, we can click on processes
and it shows all the different processes
running on the server very similar to services,
although services is another option
that you see on the lower left hand side.
So this tells us how much CPU is being used,
the status, the description, things like that.
And you can click on any one of these as well.
And you can see more information at the bottom.
If we go to the top and choose settings,
one of the more important areas here is extensions,
as I had mentioned earlier.
And you can see the available extensions
as well as ones that are already installed.
So you can pick any one of these that are available,
highlight them and click install.
And then it will show up on the left hand side
after you go back into the main area.
So it's refreshing after installing that application
and any new extensions
that we might have added will show up on the left hand side.
I'm going to go back to Windows Admin center
at the homepage and I'm going to add in client one.
So I'm going to choose Windows PCs.
I'll add in client one.
And now you can see it's added client one as well.
Just like we added DC two and file server one.
So you can add clients and servers as needed.
Windows Admin Center is an evolving application
from Microsoft to monitor and maintain servers
and clients in a Windows and Azure Cloud environment.