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Thank you for joining us this week for the Windows Server Summit! Q&A is now closed, but all sessions are available on demand so you can watch and learn when it is convenient for you. We hope you enjoyed the event.
- I am really looking forward for the Windows LAPS and for the new Azure Arc-enabled Servers Experience. Some of my thoughts so far: - Will there by also an Integration of Azure Update Manager in Windows Admin Center? Will I be see the attached Maintenance Configuration from Azure Update Manager in Windows Admin Center? - What would also be beneficial for troubleshooting would be to have an Extension which would up a program to open up .log files similar to CMTrace from Microsoft Configuration Manager.
- I appreciate much the inverse Moore's law / Hockey Stick on the VM list loading times and other areas. Exceptionally good outlook on the new features!
Could you please share a timeline when to expect a release of WAC GW that will replace features currently using Azure MMA (e.g. Update Manager). The MMA is out of the door soon, and the goal should be to avoid creating legacy dependencies with MMA. Appreciate your time and feedback on this question.
When thinking about, we would use the WAC extension on all Clients and Servers (Arc-enabled or Azure VM), is it secure to open a TCP port on each of these for the WAC extention?
Is this port TCP communication limited to communicating directly to Azure Portal / Arc Plan, so it avoids open a new attack vector?- I am of the understanding that WAC can only be used for Azure Commercial. Is there an estimated time for use with Azure Gov?
- Davanna-White
Microsoft
For Windows Admin Center on-premises, you can register your gateway in Azure Gov and use the services that are available in Azure Gov regions. For Windows Admin Center in Azure, we unfortunately currently do not have a roadmap for Azure Gov support.
- Something I was missing is when adding Azure Virtual Adapter, you can do in WAC but you won't see it this Azure Adapter in this pane or networking pane itself. Is this expected? Would be great to have visibility on this vNIC.
- Great point, it also happened in our lab environment, after we have added Azure Adapter using WAC, the notification shown installation in progress follow by completion with all components created successfully in Azure, however, from the node perspective, we can't find any vNic being added nor connection "app" that allowing us to establish the connection. Shall we create the connection manually using the AzureVPN app after the Azure Adapter installation ?
- Prasidh_AroraTell us which areas you want to us to improve in Windows Admin Center! Comment below ->
- - More informative notification bar or message during progress execution, for example % on the bar - More responsive "auto-update" for the WAC itself. Extension update have been well improved, well done. - Improvement on SDN extension - Deployment of single-node cluster using WAC - Deployment of S2D using WAC with Windows Server Datacenter edition
- semi annual releases of WAC
- more time to test preview and fixing critical issues with "LCU" I appreciate a lot that 2311 received 2 hotfixes now, but there is single click no auto-update for these.
- more visibility on actions on wacfeedback platform. "working on / completed / looking into / declined"
- an optimized way to display objects in WAC. Especially when managing Clusters, VMs, CSVs, Physical Disks, Networks
- A way to centrally manage these columns for all admins (presets), through GUI or YAML?
WAC offers so many useful optional columns on the top right in these areas. - If we could manage which columns are visible, and in which order
- Changing order of columns top / down clicks is a bit hard atm, order them via drag drop (or again YAML would be cool.
- The user could still disable or re-order these if required. Now every admin must add this manually, instead of receiving a standardized set of views.
- There is so much data and columns it becomes hardly readable even on 21:9 screens with high resolution. I don't know how but the old consoled packed a lot of information in fewer space (but were not well-scalable for their fonts). If the display of information could be improved for everything that's currently a table based on row / columns this would be super helpful. Now there is a huge trade off and manual interaction to resize columns.
- A way to centrally manage these columns for all admins (presets), through GUI or YAML?
- Discoverability of machines! The ability to scan Active Directory or maybe Entra ID for devices to manage and filter based on some basic criteria (OS = Server for example)
- adding to this thought for shared lists we can search for AD, delegating for SSO is then a customer's responsibility via PS. The housekeeping of shared lists and delegations could be improved if I understand Charles correctly. This includes removing deleted server and computer objects from AD to be deleted in WAC. This is all for the on-premises GW at least.
- The LAPS RDP feature looks cool, but It would also be great if kerberos auth could come to server 2025 rdp gateway. We require all rdp to go through our gateway so we can enforce MFA via radius. Will kerberos rdp support come to server 2025 given the push to move away from NTLM?
This is actually an interesting question. Would be interesting to see an answer from NedPyle and/or Steve Syfuhs (But not really related to WAC)
- Pierre_Roman
Hey Joseph, There is a great session by Ned Pyle tomorrow on authentication. i suggest you catch that one. https://aka.ms/WSS2024/WindowsAuth
- A major request for some time has been to have a native desktop client for WAC. Many people have requested this. Is there any status update on this request?
- You already have. It is called Server Manager (default installed and started on Servers). MMC will become deprecated. PowerShell is leading. Every MS developer does make it work in PowerShell FIRST before making any UI. Under the hood it will all be PowerShell.
- Prasidh_AroraAgreed, has been requested for a while! What's your main motivation around this? I'm assuming performance? Bringing a native client won't inherently improve performance. We are actively working on performance updates with our modernized gateway and Hyper-V improvements, while still keeping it a web-based application. Would love to hear your thoughts on whether these improvements start addressing your concern.
- Microsoft tried the "web based" approach in the 90s and realized it was bad, so they invented MMC. MMC is extensible and highly configurable. You can make console files that contain only the tools you need, and even lock it down to share those console files with help desk staff, etc. It remains far superior to a webpage. No one would have been opposed to a web front end to MMC, but that's not what MS did. Microsoft could have (should have) "modernized" the MMC platform instead of creating WAC. I've never met an IT pro who prefers WAC over MMC. I guess this is another case of MS missing/ignoring the needs of their customers. WAC has some cool features, but those could have been added to MMC.
