- [Instructor] I mentioned previously
that one of PowerShell's limitations
is that it doesn't have easy to view reports.
Let's take a look at an example.
If I go ahead and run PowerShell as an administrator
on this workstation, go ahead and say yes
so that we have permission.
I can run cmdlets to look at some of the basic
storage management information.
I can type Get-Disk and when I look at the results,
it will look very much like the bottom half
of the old disk management tool that we've seen before.
If I were to run the cmdlet Get-Volume,
it'll give me information
that looks a lot like the top half.
The only problem is I can't do much with this information.
It's not like I can right click
on one of these lines of text and make any changes.
These are some of the limitations of working in PowerShell.
Here in the Admin Center however,
there's a little bit of a different story.
Let me go ahead and maximize this
and for now, let's go ahead and skip the tour.
This is the Windows Admin Center.
During previous stages, it was known as Project Honolulu
and it's a management tool that first made its debut
when Microsoft was releasing semi-annual
versions of Windows Server.
From here, I can add connections
to any of the servers in the domain.
I can choose to add a connection to the domain controller
and if I'm pointed to the DNS server
that knows where these servers are found,
I can type out the name of the server
and DNS will search for it for me.
And if it can find it, there it is, found, submit,
it's going to ask me about some credentials possibly.
It looks like since I'm logged in as cwhite
who has administrative privileges,
it allowed to make that connection
without an additional log in.
And from here, I can open that server
and I can have access to a lot of management processes.
And I've been using the terms management and administration.
And I want to make sure that we're all on the same page
as to what these words mean.
Management usually refers to the things
that you can configure
about what a server is or what it has.
Administration refers to configuration
of what a server does.
You would manage things like disk configuration
or network addresses.
You would administer things like DNS
or active directory, other server roles.
The Windows Admin Center is designed for management
more than administration.
The WAC can only be installed on reasonably
current versions of Windows Server or Windows Workstation.
It can install on Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise,
and it can install on servers 2016,
anything in the Semi-Annual release channel
as well as Windows Server 2019.
But it's capable of managing Windows 10 and beyond
and in terms of servers, Windows Server 2012 and beyond.
Here where you can see
that we've added the domain controller,
we have a list that looks and feels a lot
like working in Azure and that's on purpose.
We can manage several aspects of our server,
things that the server is and things that the server has.
If I scroll down through this alphabetic list,
here we can find storage.
And off to the right, we can see the same information
that we were able to spot in PowerShell
but we can quickly move back and forth
between different aspects of the storage management
on that remote server.
We could just as easily look this information up
on the local machine but we're talking
about remote administration here.
Within each category, volumes, file shares, disks,
there are tasks that we can perform.
We can select the volume where Windows is installed
and we can do things like resize the volume
and edit the volume properties
like the name of the volume and so forth.
All of the same tasks that we could do
in disk management locally.
It even takes things a bit further.
If I scroll back up in the list and go to the Files menu,
we can take storage management to a different level.
Here we can go so far as to create folders
and to move content around within the drives.
We have all of this access through this single Admin Center.
You don't have to install this Admin Center
on every server that you want to monitor
as you've seen in this demonstration,
you can install it on the workstation
where you'll be sitting when you do the work
or you could put it on a server to host as a website
to allow more widespread access to these management tools.
This Admin Center is designed after the pattern
that's already been created in Azure.
Also the Admin Center's created for exchange,
SharePoint and many others.
The application of this type of web portal
for managing servers is a natural evolution
and it provides many benefits
to anyone managing Windows servers.