Wouldn’t it be great to Administer all your Servers (Azure and local) and Computers from a single place without any agents or special 3rd party software? I know that sounds very interesting, there is a solution, and it costs nothing!
Explaining the Problem
One of the most time-consuming IT operations is handling day-to-day requests. This leads to manually connecting to PCs, Servers, Cloud Infrastructures, Virtual VM Infrastructures (Hyper-V), and Server Clusters. Really how many times during your working hours do you just want to quickly check real-time performance from a server or a computer or extend a disk? I have been in that position, I would say several times daily. Lets see how we can reduce Windows management time in half or less.
Optimize your Time
I always believed that Tasks and operations that are repetitive should be automated as much as possible.
The solution provided by Microsoft itself by freely providing us with software that can be installed on a server, on a high available cluster, or locally on our PC. Of course, if you install it on a server, you can access it from anywhere with your browser, even if you are not on your PC. We can add all our Windows-related assets, making the Administration really simple and tremendously saving time. Let’s not mention how happy the upper management and users would be when something is handled lighting fast.
The application is the Windows Admin Center. I will quickly explain the Installation and how you can benefit from it in the following steps.
Prerequisites
The software can be installed on Windows 10, Windows Server 2016, and Windows Server 2019 officially supported (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-server/manage/windows-admin-center/plan/installation-options#installation-supported-operating-systems). Although I believe it will work on Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022. It doesn’t need IIS, SQL DB, or AD to work and is extremely lightweight in resources consuming. The only prerequisite for the assets added to the platform is to have installed WMF 5.1 (http://aka.ms/wmf5download) on older operating systems such as Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2.
Installation:
Download the Installation from here -> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-admin-center . Follow the steps in the image carousel below. If you install the application on a server, make sure it doesn’t use port 443 already.
Adding Assets
When you log in on the management page, you can add any Assets by manually typing them. if you are part of an active directory domain, you can directly import them from the wizard it provides:
Effective Administration
We have installed the software, added all the assets that we want to Administer, and now is the exciting part. We can fully manage all the assets by simply clicking on them and connecting. We then will get an Azure-like side dashboard with all the categories we can view and manage. Some of the immediately interesting ones are: Events, Installed Apps, Local Users & Groups, PowerShell, Services, Storage, Processes, Performance monitor, Updates, Azure hybrid center, and many others that you can explore.
Extensions as Epilogue
The application is fully compatible with Azure. So, if you go to Settings-> Account, you can sign in and Register with Azure, which will allow you to add and manage Assets on the Azure. Something else that is buried inside settings is that if you go in Settings -> Extensions, an application providing Extension capabilities, you can extend its functionality and administer other services, such as DHCP, DNS, Active Directory, Azure Cloud Shell, etc.
If the above sounds confusing, very technical, or just time consuming for you current capacity, we are here to help Contact us by Clicking Here. We are helping businesses to stabilizing and optimizing their environments. We also offer monitoring as a service if you just want us to keep an eye and alert you if something has indications of the will stop working soon. Here is an article related to monitoring
 | About Alexios Pappas – Alexios Pappas has worked internally in IT Departments in multi-role technical and management positions for many years. In parallel, Alexios led IT multinational projects across several countries globally as an IT Freelancer. He repeatedly got Top Rated Plus distinction and also 100% satisfaction rate for over one and a half-decade, resulting from the Client’s feedback. Since 2015 he has been focused on informing and helping Businesses that want to improve and excel in their IT Section. |