Your new Windows Admin Center experience for virtualization infrastructure
Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode is a new experience that helps you manage your virtualization infrastructure across your Hyper-V clusters, storage (SAN, NAS, and HCI), and networking configurations.
Download Now in Public Preview!
When searching for a new virtualization platform, one of the key factors to consider is the management tool. Ultimately, a strong management platform means efficiency for your team; it means deploying, updating, or troubleshooting with ease; it means assurance that you’ll be home in time for dinner with the family. In this article, we'll introduce you to our new management tool for virtualization called Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode.
A management tool as great as our hypervisor
Windows Server has always sported a world-class inbox hypervisor– Hyper-V (since 2008). Hyper-V runs the world’s computer, Microsoft Azure, along with some of the largest and most demanding systems on the planet like Office 365 mail servers, Azure SQL databases, and other high-demand and key services at Microsoft. These services use Hyper-V on Windows Server and so Hyper-V is critical to Windows Server.
Hyper-V scales beyond most (if not all) other publicly available hypervisors, supporting 4 Petabytes of RAM per host and 2048 logical processors; it supports Windows, Linux, and some FreeBSD guest operating systems (same list as Azure); and it supports a huge list of features from the simplest (e.g. live migration and GPU partitioning) to the most complex scenarios (e.g. Hyperconverged Infrastructure and Software Defined Networking).
It’s often missed that if you’re already running Windows Server as a VM on another platform, you can transfer that license to the host and run Hyper-V, which simultaneously licenses the host and guest at no additional cost. Speak to any Microsoft representative if you’d like more information.
Until now, we’ve struggled to meet your expectations in a management tool. Despite multiple updates and attempts to refine them, the results fell short. Windows Server supports a wide range of scenarios, but this versatility often led to tools that were too complex and too generic, lacking the tailored experience needed for specific use cases.
Those days are over...
If you’re ready for a switch to Windows Server Hyper-V, the best management experience is in the redesigned Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode, or vMode as we call it colloquially. We completely rearchitected Windows Admin Center to better support virtualization environments.
The rest of this article will introduce you to vMode and give pointers to the public preview released at Microsoft Ignite 2025. In future articles, we’ll dive into the transformation of Windows Admin Center that enabled these changes along with various capabilities of vMode.
What is Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode?
Put simply, vMode is a purpose-built virtualization management tool. It lets you deploy, manage, and troubleshoot your virtualization infrastructure to ensure your virtual machines are running in peak condition. You can view your compute (Hyper-V), storage (SAN, File Servers, HCI), and network configurations (Network ATC) in a single pane of glass, organizing these systems into groups that make sense to your needs. You can also deploy and manage virtual machines in your infrastructure.
What’s better to help you visualize vMode than to roll a 1-minute montage!?
As you can see, vMode is a complete overhaul of Windows Admin Center, completely focused on virtualization, and it’s available for download in Public Preview if you want to give it a shot and check out the documentation .
Different modes for different roles
“But I liked the current experience!”
-The millions of existing Windows Admin Center customers.
If you liked the current Windows Admin Center experience, I have excellent news: that’s still available. The existing Windows Admin Center experience is great at server administration, which is useful if you are logging into the servers (including virtual machines), to perform some administrative functions. You know, administrative tasks like:
- Installing roles and features
- Managing updates
- Reviewing event logs
- Checking performance counters, etc.
This experience will be refocused on administrative tasks and will henceforth be referred to as Windows Admin Center: Administration Mode. This creates a clear dichotomy between the Windows Admin Center experiences, ensuring each provides a tailored mode that best meets the needs of each role:
- Administration Mode focused on server administration tasks
- Virtualization Mode streamlined for virtualization management
Installation remains as simple as it’s always been; you’ll just choose whether you want to install Administration Mode (aMode) or Virtualization Mode (vMode).
At the time of writing, Administration Mode (Windows Admin Center 2511) and Virtualization Mode are currently separate installers. Once Virtualization Mode is generally available, the installers will be unified and will include an option for mode selection.
Next Blog
In the next article, we’ll dive into the transformation of Windows Admin Center into modes and highlight some of the architectural and principled changes between them. Until then, let me leave you with a few links so you can:
- Download and tryout Public Preview of Windows Admin Center: Virtualization Mode.
- Read the documentation for Public Preview.
- And watch our presentation at Ignite (also shown below).
And of course, don’t forget to give us feedback (Use the Issues tab)! Your feedback is why we ventured down this road to create a dedicated mode for virtualization in the first place!
Thanks for reading,
Dan “vMode Activator” Cuomo
Microsoft
