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Windows Admin Center announced

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Good news - the remote management experience known as Project 'Honolulu' has a new name and is now available for download.

The announcement has more details, but here are some of the highlights.

What is Windows Admin Center?

If you’re an IT administrator managing Windows Server and Windows, you probably open dozens of consoles for day-to-day activities, such as Event Viewer, Device Manager, Disk Management, Task Manager, Server Manager – the list goes on and on. Windows Admin Center brings many of these consoles together in a modernized, simplified, integrated, and secure remote management experience.

Here’s how Windows Admin Center helps IT admins:

  • Simple and modern management experience: Windows Admin Center is a lightweight, browser-based GUI platform and toolset for IT admins to remotely manage Windows Server and Windows 10 machines.
  • Hybrid capabilities: Windows Admin Center can manage Windows Server and Windows 10 instances anywhere including physical systems, virtual machines on any hypervisor, or running in any cloud. Connect to the cloud with optional value-added features like integration with Azure Site Recovery for protecting your virtual machines, and support for Azure Active Directory to control access with multi-factor authentication.
  • Integrated toolset: Rather than switching between several different tools and contexts, with Windows Admin Center you get a holistic overview of your resources and the ability to dig into granular details. In addition to server and client machines, it allows you to manage failover clusters and hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) deployments.
  • Designed for extensibility: We’ve been working with early-adopter partners to refine the extension development experience in a private preview of our SDK. That means soon you’ll be able to extend Windows Admin Center’s capabilities to 3rd-party solutions. For example, you’ll start to see 3rd party hardware vendors use Windows Admin Center to provide management of their own hardware.

Frequently asked questions

Q: What versions of Windows Server can I manage with Windows Admin Center?

A: Windows Admin Center will be optimized for Windows Server 2019 and enables key themes in the upcoming Windows Server 2019 release, hybrid cloud scenarios and hyper-converged infrastructure management in particular. Although Windows Admin Center will work best with Windows Server 2019, it supports managing a variety of versions that customers already use: Windows Server 2012 and newer. Please refer to our documentation for full version support details.

Q: Is Windows Admin Center a complete replacement for all traditional in-box and RSAT tools?

A: No. Although Windows Admin Center can manage many common scenarios, it does not completely replace all traditional Microsoft Management Console (MMC) tools. For a detailed look at what tools are included with Windows Admin Center, read more about managing servers in our documentation.

Windows Admin Center is complementary to and does not replace RSAT (Remote Server Administration Tools) since roles such as Active Directory, DHCP, DNS, and IIS do not yet have equivalent management capabilities surfaced in Windows Admin Center.

Q: Which web browsers are supported by Windows Admin Center?

A: The latest versions of Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome browsers are tested and supported on Windows 10. Other modern web browsers or other platforms are not currently part of our test matrix and are therefore not officially supported.

Q: Are there any cloud dependencies?

A: No. Windows Admin Center does not require Internet access and does not require Microsoft Azure. Windows Admin Center manages Windows Server and Windows 10 instances anywhere including on physical systems, in virtual machines on any hypervisor, or running in any cloud. Although integration with various Azure services will be added over time, these will be optional value-added features and not a requirement to use Windows Admin Center.