Following months of testing as part of a technical preview, Microsoft today made its Project Honolulu generally available. What's more, the project now has an official name: Windows Admin Center (opens in new tab) (via Neowin).
Initially introduced at Microsoft's Ignite 2017 conference, Windows Admin Center was built to offer a central place for IT administrators to manage many of the tools they deal with every day. Those include Event Viewer, Device Manager, and Server Manager, among others. The service is also browser-based and officially supported in Chrome and Edge.
Overall, Microsoft is pitching Windows Admin Center as a way to help IT administrators in four key areas. From Microsoft:
- 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.
Windows Admin Center is now available and supported for use in production environments, Microsoft says. It's worth noting that the latest versions of Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome are currently the only browsers that have undergone testing and are officially supported by Windows Admin Center.
Windows Admin Center is available to download (opens in new tab) from Microsoft now.
Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the Editor in Chief for Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter @DthorpL and Instagram @heyitsdtl. Got a hot tip? Send it to daniel.thorp-lancaster@futurenet.com.
