Back at Ignite 2017, Microsoft announced a preview of Project Honolulu, which was designed to give developers and IT admins one central place to remotely manage Windows Server and Windows 10. A little over half a year later, the company followed up today to rename Project Honolulu and generally make it available it as “Windows Admin Center.”
The browser-based Windows Admin Center brings together many consoles together in one modernized, simplified, integrated, and secure remote management experience. This means IT Admins no longer have to separately open Event Viewer, Device Manager, Disk Management, Task Manager, and Server Manager. Windows Admin Center comes with the following benefits.
- 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.
Microsoft says Project Honolulu was downloaded a total of 50,000 times, with over 25,000 + customer deployments, and 250,000+ unique connection instances. Windows Admin Center is now ready for use in production environments and supports both Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 2012, at no additional cost beyond Windows licenses. You can download it by checking here.
