Windows Admin Center version 2211 is now in Public Preview!

[Trung_Tran]

Today, we are releasing our latest version of Windows Admin Center! Windows Admin Center version 2211 is now in Public Preview. Thank you to our customers, partners, and fans for helping us to continue to improve and make Windows Admin Center better! We’re working constantly to ensure users of our product have the best user experience.

Platform updates

Accessibility: support for 400% zoom

We’re excited to provide support for reflow and up-to 400% zoom for our customers. Now, visually impaired users are able to zoom in and navigate through Windows Admin Center without any issues or worry. The UI components will adjust dynamically as the user zooms in and provide the same seamless experience that you all know and love.

Support for WDAC-enforced infrastructure

With thousands of new malicious files created every day, using traditional methods like antivirus solutions—signature-based detection to fight against malware—provides an inadequate defense against new attacks.

In most organizations, information is the most valuable asset, and ensuring that only approved users have access to that information is imperative. However, when a user runs a process, that process has the same level of access to data that the user has. As a result, sensitive information could easily be deleted or transmitted out of the organization if a user knowingly or unknowingly runs malicious software.

Windows Defender application control (WDAC) can help mitigate many security threats by restricting the applications that users are allowed to run and the code that runs in the System Core (kernel). Application control policies can also block unsigned scripts and MSIs, and restrict Windows PowerShell to run in Constrained Language Mode. Learn more about Application Control for Windows.

In this preview, Windows Admin Center now supports managing your WDAC-enforced infrastructure. This capability enables you to use the modern interface of Windows Admin Center to manage your secure environments, no matter where they are running. Application control is a crucial line of defense for protecting enterprises given today’s threat landscape, and it has an inherent advantage over traditional antivirus solutions. Learn more. 

Azure AD Graph to Microsoft Graph migration

Microsoft Graph represents the best-in-breed API surface. It offers a single unified endpoint to access Azure AD services and Microsoft 365 services such as Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Intune. Microsoft Graph API's usage has more than doubled that of Azure AD Graph, and in the past two years we have added 167 new features. Microsoft Graph is also more secure and resilient than Azure AD Graph.

Microsoft Graph has all the capabilities that have been available in Azure AD Graph and new APIs like identity protection and authentication methods. Its client libraries offer built-in support for features like retry handling, secure redirects, transparent authentication, and payload compression.

Now all these enhanced capabilities are leveraged by Windows Admin Center to give you the best experience possible!

ADAL to MSAL migration

MSAL is designed to enable a secure solution without developers having to worry about the implementation details. It simplifies and manages acquiring, managing, caching, and refreshing tokens, and uses best practices for resilience.

Additional Capabilities of MSAL over ADAL:

• Auth broker support – Device-based Conditional Access policy
• Proof of possession tokens
• Azure AD certificate-based authentication (CBA) on mobile
• System browsers on mobile devices
• Where ADAL had only authentication context class, MSAL exposes the notion of a collection of client apps (public client and confidential client).

You will experience no changes in your infrastructure once you upgrade to this public preview build as Windows Admin Center takes care of all the necessary configurations for you to leverage all these amazing new capabilities.

Visual design refresh 

The overall look and feel of Windows Admin Center has been refreshed to provide a sleeker, more modern experience. This includes new section title breadcrumbs and colorful icons. 

Azure Stack HCI management

Azure Stack HCI cluster Properties page 

Have you ever wanted to access all the basic information about your Azure Stack HCI cluster in one place? The new Properties page in Cluster Manager Settings brings cluster, operating system, and hardware related information to a single page with click-to-copy functionality. 

Settings search feature with smart keywords 

The settings pages for Windows Admin Center, Cluster Manager, Server Manager, and Computer Management now contain a search box to improve navigation. The search feature can handle non-trivial keywords to match more than just the section title. 

Volumes tool

In this release, we are introducing an edit volume settings feature that will enable resizing volumes and changing the provisioning type from Fixed to Thin. Thin provisioning conversion is a new feature for Azure Stack HCI 22H2 and now supported in Windows Admin Center. Customers can convert their existing Fixed volumes to Thin and get space savings with little to no downtime. Please note that once converted to Thin, it is not supported to revert back to Fixed provisioned. The resize volume capability will replace the existing “Expand” functionality, customers can expand their volumes to a larger size or even over-provision when the volume is set to Thin. Try selecting Fixed and Thin in the Volume Settings pane to see the Maximum volume size field reflect this change! 

SDN updates

Managing SDN via Windows Admin Center has now graduated to General Availability: After a comprehensive set of quality enhancements and resolution of known issues, all SDN extensions are moving into the General Availability tier, and the preview banners have been removed for all extensions. 

We’ve also made several improvements in the monitoring and health of SDN. These changes include: 

• The SDN dashboard no longer requires a user to enter the name of a Network Controller (NC) VM to fetch health information for the SDN deployment.   
• We have also fixed a bunch of issues related to SDN health reporting. Now, you will be able to see accurate health information for all the SDN resources. Moreover, each alert is more actionable with severity, details and time.  
• We now show information and expiry dates for SDN certificates. This will help you plan certificate rotations in a timely manner and avoid disruptions.  

Additionally, when adding an Azure Stack HCI cluster to Windows Admin Center, you no longer need to input the NC REST uri. SDN is auto-detected when you click on the SDN Infrastructure extension in Windows Admin Center.  Read more about SDN improvements on Azure Stack HCI.

If you checked out our WAC 2208 Public Preview of SDN extensions, you may be presented with a notification like the below when attempting to load Virtual Networks and/or Logical Networks:

"The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel."

For more details, please see the blog post below for the workaround:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/networking-blog/troubleshooting-sdn-windows-admin-center-cert...

Windows Admin Center in Azure 

A few months ago, we release the preview of Windows Admin Center in Azure to manage your Arc-enabled servers and Azure Stack HCI clusters.

This new capability enables seamless and granular management of your Arc-enabled Windows servers and virtual machines as well as Azure Stack HCI systems (in addition to your IaaS VMs) from within the Azure portal. You can securely manage your servers and clusters from the cloud—without needing a VPN, public IP address, or other inbound connectivity to your machine.

Here is a short video highlighting some of the capabilities included with Windows Admin Center: How to use Windows Admin Center in the Azure portal.

Over the next few weeks, your instances of Windows Admin Center in Azure will update to include the awesome new features from this Windows Admin Center 2211 preview. Stay tuned!

Extension updates

Cluster create

This new build introduces a couple of bug fixes including the domain join issue in Stage 1.3, the 1% stuck issue in Stage 3.2, and the server restart issue in Stage 1.7. This new version also comes with support for clustering VMs using Network ATC as long as the VMs both have 2 or more processors.

Download today!

We hope you enjoy this latest update of Windows Admin Center, the various new functionality in preview, and all the extensions now available. Learn more and download today!

As always, thanks for your ongoing support, adoption, and feedback. Your contributions through user feedback continue to be vital and valuable to us, helping us prioritize and sequence our investments.

Windows Admin Center is continuously evolving and growing as a tool and a platform, and we are beyond thrilled to have you part of our journey.

To skill up on Windows Admin Center and Windows Server 2022, check out our Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Certification and other featured Learn courses.

Thank you,

Windows Admin Center Team (@servermgmt)

[Gabriel Luiz]

Nice! 

[Karl_Wester-Ebbinghaus]

Great news @Trung_Tran !  would you mind sharing a more verbose list on bugfixes and feature improvements, if you have any? I imagine this could be possible to related to github or other channels where issues have been reported.

It would make it easier to browse through and reduce our shared list.

[fmelloti]

Awesome!!

[Darifer]

Great 

[Taomyn_352]

@Trung_Tran For many months I've been unable to download any previews whether it be Admin Center or Windows ISOs and always get this message:

Error

We encountered a problem with your request. Please visit Microsoft Support Contact Us page for assistance. Refer to Message Code 715-123130 and Transaction ID aa0ad6d6-e943-41a0-a674-6551f627b26a.

Any ideas? I've tried various parts of the Tech Community including chat support but no-one seems to be able help and I just get told to try different places.

[Karl_Wester-Ebbinghaus]

@Taomyn_352 please try https://aka.ms/wacdownload. As for your error I believe you should purge your browser cache and cookies, log off your MS account and try again. Hope this helps

[Karl_Wester-Ebbinghaus]

@Trung_Tran @Gabriel Luiz @Thomas Maurer 
can anyone else confirm that several items in WAC settings do not work anymore in 2208 preview? 

Upgraded from 2210.2 to 2208.

Even if you enter the direct link in the address bar WAC will not open most of the subsites in Settings

These work as expected:

- register

- proxy

- general

- diagnostic

- perf profile

- advanced

- personalization 

- language

all other will open account page instead or a blank page.

[Taomyn_352]

@Karl_Wester-Ebbinghaus thanks but that link is for the live version

which is what this post is all about and I want the 2208 preview, plus I've tried everything like that even at different work locations, even countries, since I changed jobs between when it first happened and recently. Fresh machines/browsers, nothing helps I just get that error after choosing US English and trying to download. 

[Karl_Wester-Ebbinghaus_business]

Pardon: @Taomyn_352 yes the link does not work with the preview. 

Can confirm that the download does not work anymore for 2208 for me as well on the first attempt. In a second it was successful. I believe, this is a session issue on the Windows Server Insider page.

[Prasidh_Arora]

@Karl_Wester-Ebbinghaus Sorry for the late reply. Are you still seeing these issues? I suspect this has something to do with your installation time, let me reach out to you offline :)

[Taomyn_352]

I'm still unable to download the WAC 2208 preview - it's not a "session" issue as I've been getting this for the best part of a year and no-one at Microsoft seems to be able to explain the problem. The same message each and every time no matter what PC, operating system or browser, this is what I get after choosing the language, English US which is the only option I get and hitting confirm:

[Prasidh_Arora]

@Taomyn_352 Let me message you privately and get you a build!

[Tang_Tianfeng]

Where can i get the latest sample code and Develpoer Guide Sample code

[Karl_Wester-Ebbinghaus_business]

@Prasidh_Arora cheers. Still seeing the issue with the options menu. Looking forward to hear from you. Appreciate your investigation very much. 

[Taomyn_352]

Finally was able to install the preview to update my server (thank you @Prasidh_Arora for the file) and it's running well so far. I only criticism is that the installer continues to reinstall all the default extensions if they were uninstalled before e.g. all the Azure ones - very annoying when 50% of them are of zero use to my environment. Please can this be fixed for a future release?

[Karl_Wester-Ebbinghaus]

Dear @Trung_Tran @Prasidh_Arora will you have sessions about WAC this ignite?

If I am not mistaken, there's only one session in the line-up.

Thanks for sharing some news.

A roundtable (in person + digital) would be cool. 

[Sam_T]

@Trung_Tran 

@servermgmt

@Davanna-White 

Hundreds of issues and requests reported here and in github over the last year or so. Virtually no progress on these.

Can't be bothered to respond to thoughtful questions and concerns that people took the time post in this blog.

Doesn't bode well for the future of WAC and WAC is really starting to look like just another MS product that will be silently deprecated, no longer supported and no longer discussed by Microsoft. 

[Karl_Wester-Ebbinghaus_business]

Well Sam, hear your point about the development speed and transparency, in which regard I also reached out to the team. It is a weird situation mirroring the state you describe with the fact that there is some progress every year, or new ideas like the WAC integration in Azure.

[Prasidh_Arora]

@Tang_Tianfeng The most up-to-date material is in the Developer Guide extension in the product itself, where there should be sample code for many of the angular components, among other things. If there is not sample code for the component you are looking to use, or you have any other questions pertaining to extension development, please reach out to the WAC team at wacextensionrequest@microsoft.com and we can assist you. 

@Taomyn_352 Updates shouldn't cause this. Could you please file an issue on https://aka.ms/wacfeedback

@Karl_Wester-Ebbinghaus WAC doesn't have a dedicated session but it's going to be featured in different ways around Ignite. I would recommend watching this session for an announcement ;) Increase your business agility and resilience with the latest Azure infrastructure solutions (micros...

@Sam_T We really, sincerely appreciate the feedback here. I want to start by assuring everyone that we continue to value and invest in Windows Admin Center every day and with every build that we create. I empathize with these concerns, and we are truly working hard to make Windows Admin Center an excellent tool to manage Windows Server and Azure Stack HCI. For full transparency, instead of addressing direct bugs at this time, we are working to address this from the bottom-up - i.e. answering the question "what is causing all these bugs to appear in the first place?". We're actively working on a thorough UI automated testing pipeline to prevent further bugs from being introduced. Once this is available, we'll systematically work through bugs and be sure that we are not introducing additional bugs in the process. Yes, progress seems slow right now, but we're working on some long-term investments that will make new features in WAC much easier to release, without introducing regressions.

[Karl_Wester-Ebbinghaus_business]

Thanks for bringing some clarity about the procedure happening in the background.

"an excellent tool to manage Windows Server and Azure Stack HCI", may I add Windows 10/11 which is also of significant help to have the ability to access most management tasks remotely without interrupting the user. I am sure I have shared also feedback in this regard via MS ToDo.

[Sam_T]

@Trung_Tran 

@servermgmt

@Davanna-White 

Interesting response, unfortunately it doesn't explain why your group can't be bothered to respond to thoughtful questions and concerns that people took the time post in this blog.

As for "We're actively working on", unfortunately I'm from Missouri.

[Alban1998]

Hello,

Question for @Prasidh_Arora : do you know if there are any plans to improve extensions installation/update process ? Having to restart WAC for every single one of them is tedious, to say the least. Isn't it possible to install them all then restart WAC only once ?

I understand there is an automatic extension update option, but I've never see it work for some reason.

Thanks

[Karl_Wester-Ebbinghaus_business]

I would like to add to the question of @Alban1998. Is there a PowerShell module for WAC that helps with mass updating of extensions? 'Despite auto-update is enabled, we still see pending Microsoft extension updates at different customers. Currently need to install them manually one by one, with said restart of the WAC. GUI does not allow to select and update more than one extension at a time to initiate an update. In the WAC PowerShell Scripting block section, I missed a commandlet for updating extensions.

There is this third-party module, but it has been stopped in development, so I don't feel like I would use this in production.

GitHub - rchaganti/PSWindowsAdminCenter: PowerShell commands for managing Windows Admin Center

[Deleted]

For the version 2211, Can we control automatic upgrade?

[Taomyn_352]

@Prasidh_Arora sorry to bother, but I am yet again still unable to download previews from the official page - it's exactly the same error telling me to report it to the same places where I cannot get any help. This is almost beyond a joke now.

[Deleted]

@Taomyn_352 

https://software.download.prss.microsoft.com/dbazure/WindowsAdminCenterPreview2211.msi?t=9a1f4298-21...

Links valid for 24 hours from time of creation.

Links expire: 11/26/2022 12:41:20 AM UTC

[Taomyn_352]

@Deleted thanks for the link - I was able to download it and then later installed it. Still annoyed the installer adds back all the default extensions that I had uninstalled before, then have to spend time to remove them all again.

[Karl_Wester-Ebbinghaus]

Dear @Trung_Tran is there any ETA for the fix onboarding Azure Monitoring?

Next to the fix it is critical that WAC does no longer / or let user choose to use VM insights instead of Log Analytics based Monitoring.

Same for Update Management should feasibly support Azure Update Management Center (Preview) onboarding (basically Azure Arc). Currently only supports the current solution using Azure Automation and Log Analytics Agent. 

As Log Analytics client is going away soon and migration of LA WS data is not possible, plus migration of LA Client to AMA Client is not straightforward at all, I hope this could be adressed before release with the Azure Teams.

Do you have any questions? 

[Red_Daniel]

Sorry, but this WAC release doesn't work properly!! SDN extension doesn't work: Exception on cmdlet to get Network Controller

Could fix now, please!! We are installing HCI and WAC for whole Public Administrations in Italy.

[Massimo_Pascucci]

This release should fix the error where cluster creation gets stuck in stage 3.2, right?

Well, it doesn't.

[Karl_Wester-Ebbinghaus_business]

Unfortunately, it is not right there. I also require that all network connections have IPv4, while IPv6 is preferred for RDMA Storage network / migration traffic. Also, it requires that all network interfaces have an IPv4 that is not APIPA (clearly used for connectivity tests), yet the wizard does not allow to rename network cards nor IP assignments. So basically, you must prepare everything before the wizard via PowerShell or WAC.

Besides, afaik the cluster creation wizard is based on an extension not maintained by WAC team. Could be wrong.

[Massimo_Pascucci]

@Karl_Wester-Ebbinghaus_business you put me on the right track:

it requires that all network interfaces have an IPv4 that is not APIPA

I configured all network interfaces with a valid IP address, and then finally the network settings deployment got past that 1% block.

However, apart from NOT BEING DOCUMENTED ANYWHERE, this is a completely crazy requirement: the whole purpose of this procedure is to configure network interfaces, it's simply absurd to require them to be already configured in order to overwrite their configuration (also, some of the interfaces are just not meant to have an IP address in the first place).

Let's just consider this another macroscopic bug that needs to be fixed.

Now, it would be really nice if Microsoft started actually fixing all those bugs that plague Windows Admin Center...

[Karl_Wester-Ebbinghaus_business]

Cheers, it is absurd. The issue I see is that most IT Pros and some MVPs in the area I know never use this wizard but their PowerShell scripts. As said, I would not even use IPv4 for the migration network for many reasons, one is you do not have to bother with jumbo packets.

However the Cluster Creation Wizard, as well as the migration traffic PowerShell test script from Microsoft expects IPv4. It is quite sad, it is that limited.