By Davanna White, Program Manager, Microsoft
Today, we share our newest release of Windows Admin Center – version 2311. There are improvements to some of our most used tools including Virtual Machines, Server Overview, and Updates. We also created new experiences around Azure hybrid services like Azure Arc and Azure Migrate! Please join us in our excitement about the new features we’re introducing.
A big thank you to our customers, partners, and fans for helping us to continue to improve and make Windows Admin Center better.
Here is what’s new in Windows Admin Center v2311.
Platform updates
Azure Arc onboarding at-scale
Azure Arc-enabled servers empower you to manage Windows physical servers and virtual machines hosted outside of Azure using the Azure control plane. Windows Admin Center provides an Azure Arc onboarding experience through our Azure hybrid center. New in this release, we’ve extended this experience and made it available on our All Connections page—the first page you see when you open Windows Admin Center. Now you can select multiple servers and, with a few simple clicks, onboard them to Azure Arc all at once.
As a part of this experience, we’ve also added a column to the All Connections page that displays the Azure Arc status of your machines, allowing you to take quick inventory of your hybrid connections the moment you open Windows Admin Center. If you’re not sure what a status means, you can select it to view more details without leaving the page. This status updates every fifteen minutes, ensuring that you always have up-to-date information.
This experience does not currently support onboarding of the cluster connection type. Additionally, Azure VM connections do not need to be onboarded to Azure Arc for Servers, as they are already connected to Azure. To onboard servers to Azure Arc or view their status, your Windows Admin Center gateway must be registered with Azure.
Platform Angular upgrades
In Windows Admin Center, every tool, every solution, and every experience that you use and see is built on Angular. Angular plays a critical role in each management task that you perform. In this release, Windows Admin Center takes a big step forward with an upgrade of our platform, from Angular 11 to Angular 15, bringing you the latest in Angular platform security and performance. You can expect improved load times and a smoother experience in this build of Windows Admin Center.
Note that not all extensions have been updated to use Angular 15 in this release. Extensions built on Angular 11 continue to be backwards compatible.
Developers looking to upgrade their Windows Admin Center extension can now do so using the built in command in our latest SDK version. We’ve also updated our documentation with step-by-step instructions on how to upgrade.
UI updates
We’re excited to announce a series of UI updates to Windows Admin Center, bringing it closer to Azure Portal. Pivots have been redesigned, and typography improved with updated font sizes and semi-bold headings. Form components are now 24 pixels in height, and buttons with text have adopted Azure styles. We expect these refinements to enhance usability and align with the elegance of the Azure Portal.
Platform updates
Virtual machines
We encourage you to use the tool, provide feedback on your experiences, and let us know what additional features you would like to see in the future.
Server overview
The server Overview tool has been a staple for IT administrators to get a bird’s eye view of their server’s health. This tool provides key insights into your server’s CPU usage, memory utilization, networking throughput and much more. Our team is dedicated to ensuring that this experience continues to provide value to you, our customers. To that end, we have made several improvements to this tool based on your feedback.
These improvements come in 2 parts, (1) error consolidation and (2) error messaging improvements.
We have heard your feedback about errors in the Overview tool. We have updated the underlying logic to handle certain scenarios, improving the meaning and relevance of these errors.
The second set of improvements is the error messages themselves. We have heard your feedback about certain errors being unreadable, unactionable, and even confusing at times. We have done a lot of work, collaborating with the design team and user researchers here at Microsoft, to ensure that the error messages are more readable with 3 key things in mind: (1) what went wrong, (2) what caused it, if relevant, and (3) how to fix it.
Azure Migrate
Azure Migrate provides a simplified migration, modernization, and optimization service for Azure, including ways to assess the benefits of Azure migration of your machines.
In this release, we’ve introduced a new experience in the Virtual Machines tool for assessing your Hyper-V VMs for migration to Azure. With just a few clicks, you can generate both an assessment and business case to fully understand what a migration to Azure means for you.
With an assessment, you assess your on-premises workloads to measure cloud readiness, identify risks, and estimate costs and complexity. A business case helps you build a business proposal to understand how Azure can bring the most value to your business—it includes information like on-premises vs Azure total cost of ownership, resource utilization-based insights to identify servers and workloads that are ideal for cloud, and more.
Learn more about Azure Migrate
Update tool now available for Windows Client!
Solution and tool extensions do not communicate with Windows Admin Center’s backend in-depth and should be minimally impacted by the modernized gateway. We strongly recommend testing your extension to ensure it continues to run smoothly on the new backend. In this release, we’ve enabled the Updates tool for Windows client in the Computer Management extension so you can start and schedule Windows 10 or 11 PC updates using the same experience you’re familiar with from managing your Windows Servers.
Other updates/known issues
Some customers have reported seeing an issue stating: “Error occurred while decoding OAEP padding.” Refreshing your Windows Admin Center session should fix this issue.
Some customers have experienced issues with their Windows Admin Center Azure registration, including an error stating: “Cross-origin redemption is permitted only for ‘Single-page application.’” This is because we’ve updated our Azure libraries and authentication to the latest and most secure version. Learn how to troubleshoot this error.
When using Remote Desktop, your keyboard mapping may be incorrect, especially if you are using a combination of languages on your Windows Admin Center gateway application, your gateway machine, and the machine you’re RDPing into. When this issue is fixed, we will release an extension update for the Remote Desktop tool.
In the Virtual Machines tool, the Connect experience may be failing or not working properly, especially for Azure Stack HCI configurations. When these issues are fixed, we will release an extension update for the Virtual Machines tool.
In the meantime, you can bypass the Connect experience issues by disabling TLS 1.3 on the host server. To do this, you can set the following registry key to 0: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SecurityProviders\SCHANNEL\Protocols\TLS 1.3\Server
Windows Admin Center in Azure
Windows Admin Center in Azure continuously releases new updates each month, providing you with the latest and greatest that Windows Admin Center has to offer.
Check out our release history to view the amazing progress and detailed features. This new GA build of Windows Admin Center will be available for our Azure users over the coming weeks.
Windows Admin Center in Azure for Azure IaaS VMs is generally available. Try now.
Windows Admin Center in Azure for Azure Arc-enabled servers is in preview. Try now.
Windows Admin Center in Azure for Azure Stack HCI clusters is in preview. Try now.
Streamlined deployment
When using Windows Admin Center to manage your Azure IaaS VMs, you now have a new experience that makes it easy for you to configure pre-requisites and quickly connect to Windows Admin Center. The new flow checks and configures your network connectivity, verifies RBAC access, and configures just-in-time access making it simple for you to connect to Windows Admin Center successfully every time.
To try out this new flow, visit the new “Connect” blade in the Azure Portal: Enterprise proxy support
Windows Admin Center in Azure now supports communication through a proxy server by using the HTTPS protocol. If your machine must connect through a proxy server to communicate over the internet, follow our documentation to set this up.
If you are using Arc-enabled server, Windows Admin Center automatically picks up the proxy configuration from the Arc agent, no additional configuration needed.
Download today!
We hope you enjoy this latest update of Windows Admin Center, the various new functionality in preview, and all the extensions now available. Learn more and download today!
As always, thanks for your ongoing support, adoption, and feedback. Your contributions through user feedback continue to be vital and valuable to us, helping us prioritize and sequence our investments.
Windows Admin Center is continuously evolving and growing as a tool and a platform, and we are beyond thrilled to have you part of our journey.
We’re also looking forward to the next version of Windows Server, coming soon! We recommend you check out this preview from Ignite.
This blog was originally posted on Microsoft.com and appears courtesy of Microsoft.