With Windows Admin Center you can remotely manage Windows Server running anywhere—physical, virtual, on-premises, in Azure, or in a hosted environment.
The tool, available with your Windows Server license at no additional charge, consolidates and reimagines Windows OS tools in a single, browser-based, graphical user interface.
At Microsoft Ignite 2021 Global Virtual Event they launched Windows Admin Center version 2103. Here you find the download.
Set Proxy Server in Windows Admin Center Settings.
Open in a Separate Window
This is a Separate Window on my Second Screen, this works Awesome!
Windows Admin Center Virtual Tool improvements 🙂
Conclusion
Microsoft is working hard to make Hybrid IT Management better for Administrators to manage Hybrid Cloud datacenters. Windows Admin Center is a must have for managing
Windows Server Core, AzureStack HCI, and Cluster Services. I can say: I love to work with Windows Admin Center 🙂
Dapris an open source, portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for developers to build resilient, microservice, stateless and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge. Dapr enables developers to focus on writing business logic and not solving distributed system challenges, thereby significantly improving their productivity, and reducing development time. Dapr lowers the bar for entry to build modern cloud native applications based on a microservices architecture and with this v1.0 release, Dapr applications can be deployed to self-hosted infrastructure or Kubernetes clusters in production scenarios.
Foreword byMark RussinovichAzure CTO and Technical FellowMicrosoft
With the wave of cloud adoption well underway, there is a major shift happening towards “cloud native” development, often built with microservice-architectures. These microservices are both stateless and stateful, and run on the cloud and edge, embracing the diversity of languages and frameworks available today. This enterprise shift is driven by both the market forces of faster time to market, as well as the scale and efficiencies of building services for the cloud. Even before COVID-19, cloud adoption was accelerating for enterprises and developers were being asked to do even more to deliver on building these distributed system applications, and that has only accelerated since. Developers in enterprises seek to focus on business logic, while leaning on platforms to imbue their applications with scale, resiliency, maintainability, elasticity, and the other attributes of cloud-native architectures, which is why there is also shift towards serverless platforms that hide the underlying infrastructure. Developers should not be expected to become distributed systems experts. This is where Dapr steps in to help you, whether you are building on infrastructure such as Kubernetes, or on a serverless platform.
Dapr is designed as an enterprise, developer-focused, microservices programming model platform with the mantra “any language, any framework, run anywhere”. It makes building distributed applications easy and portable across any infrastructure, from public-cloud, through hierarchical edge, and even down to single node IoT devices. It emerged from both our experiences building services in Azure as well as time spent working with customers building applications on Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Service Fabric. Over and over, we saw common problems that they had to address. It became clear that there was a need to provide a “library” of common microservice best practices that developers could use, not only in new greenfield applications, but also to aid in the modernization of existing applications. In the containerized, distributed, and networked cloud native world, the sidecar model has emerged as the preferred approach, in the same way DLLs are preferred in the client/server generation. Using Dapr’s sidecar and APIs give you, as a developer, all the power of distributed systems functionality, with the ease of a single HTTP or gRPC local call.
To address the wide range of scenarios that developers face, Dapr provides features such as state management, service to service invocation, pub/sub and integration to external systems with I/O bindings, which are based on the triggers and bindings of Azure Functions. These in turn take advantage of Dapr’s component model which allows you to “swap out”, say different underlying state stores, without having to change any code, making code more portable, more flexible and allowing for experimentation of what best suits your needs. Developers don’t need to learn and incorporate service SDKs into their code, worry about authentication, secret management, retries or conditional code that targets specific deployment environments.
This book shows how Dapr reduces your development time and overall code maintenance by incrementally “Daperizing” the canonical .NET reference application, eShop. For example, in the original eShop implementation, significant amounts of code were written to abstract between Azure Service Bus and RabbitMQ for publishing events between services. All this code can be discarded and simply replaced with Dapr’s pub/sub API and component model which had an even wider range of pub/sub brokers, rather than just two. Dapr’s actor model, when used in the reworked eShop application, shows the ease of building long running, stateful, event driven, workflow applications with all the difficulties of concurrency and multi-threading removed. By the end of this book, you will see the drastic simplification that Dapr brings to your application development, and I firmly believe all developers embarking on a cloud native app building journey should leverage Dapr.
We publicly announced Dapr with the v0.1 release in Oct 2019 and now, a year and half later, I am thrilled to say that Dapr is ready for production usage with the v1.0 release. Getting Dapr to v1.0 has truly been a community effort. It has been amazing to see the open-source community coalesce around Dapr and grow since it was first announced – from 114 contributors in October 2019 to over 700 in early 2021 – a six-fold increase in 16 months! Contributions to the project have gone to every Dapr repo and have ranged from opening issues, commenting on feature proposals, providing samples, and of course contributing code. The parts of the project community members have contributed to the most include the Dapr runtime, docs, CLI, SDKs and the creation of a rich ecosystem of components. Maintaining this openness is critical to Dapr’s future.
Dapr is really just getting started, though, and you should expect to see more Dapr capabilities and more support for Dapr in Azure services. I hope that you will take advantage of Dapr to enable you to focus on your core business logic and accelerate your microservices development. I am are excited to have you join us in the Dapr community on this journey athttps://github.com/dapr/and on Discord https://aka.ms/dapr-discord.
Modern distributed systems are complex. You start with small, loosely coupled, independently deployable services. These services cross process and server boundaries. They then consume different kinds of infrastructure backing services (databases, message brokers, key vaults). Finally, these disparate pieces compose together to form an application.
Mark RussinovichAzure CTO and Technical FellowMicrosoft
Thank you Author; Rob Vettor, Sander Molenkamp and Edwin van Wijk for this Awesome E-book 😉
The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) gives you the most command-line tools, utilities, and applications directly on Windows. I’m using Microsoft Windows Admin Center and Windows Server Core 20H2 with Build version 19042.746 to deploy WSL 2 with Ubuntu 18.04 Linux Distro. Here you find the installation of the Windows Server Core 20H2 with Windows Admin Center
In the following steps we will install the Following :
Ubuntu 18.04 is Running in WSL2 on Windows Server Core 20H2 😉
Conclusion
First of All Microsoft Windows Admin Center is supporting me in the Installation of Windows Subsystem for Linux. We have WSL 2 Running with Ubuntu 18.04 with a lot of possibilities!
What I really like is integration, like in Windows 10 and Docker for desktop with the WSL 2 Engine. Here my Blogpost
Together with VSCode Remote WSL is Cool.
Would be awesome to run Docker Windows and Linux Containers in combination with WSL 2 integration on Windows Server Core edition. Maybe in the Future, who knows?
Working with Dapr in WSL2 Remote VSCode and Ubuntu 20.04 distro
Dapr is a portable, event-driven runtime that makes it easy for any developer to build resilient, stateless and stateful applications that run on the cloud and edge and embraces the diversity of languages and developer frameworks.
Developer language SDKs and frameworks
To make using Dapr more natural for different languages, it also includes language specific SDKs for Go, Java, JavaScript, .NET and Python. These SDKs expose the functionality in the Dapr building blocks, such as saving state, publishing an event or creating an actor, through a typed, language API rather than calling the http/gRPC API. This enables you to write a combination of stateless and stateful functions and actors all in the language of their choice. And because these SDKs share the Dapr runtime, you get cross-language actor and functions support.
I’m using Windows Insider Build version 21277-RS with Docker for Windows Edge and Visual Studio Code.
Docker for Windows Edge Version Running.
Because Docker for Windows Edge support WSL2 Engine and Visual Studio Code too, brought me to an idea to build dapr into Ubuntu 20.04 WSL Distro on my Windows Insiders 21277 RS version on my Surface Book 3. There for you must activate the WSL2 integration with my default WSL distro Ubuntu-20.04.
Dapr init ( in the Ubuntu-20.04 WSL2 Linux distro )
Here you find the Dapr dev environment installation types for Dapr init, I did the standalone version. Dapr makes then the following containers :
Dapr Containers.
Then we have the following running :
Dapr Dashboard
Zipkin
Zipkin is a distributed tracing system. It helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures. Features include both the collection and lookup of this data.
Zipkin Traces
Dapr Dashboard
Now we have Dapr running in the WSL2 Ubuntu-20.04 distro, you can use Visual Studio Code on Windows Insiders using Remote WSL and work with your favourite dapr SDK like the list above 😉
From here you can work with your dapr application.
In this guide dapr is running with Docker containers, but you can also install it on Kubernetes or K8s, AKS, Azure any where, see this overview :
Dapr with Kubenetes Containers.
Dapr Overview.
Important Note : Dapr is now production ready with version 1.0 ! Developers, DevOps, AzOps, you can start with it and Build and Test your own microservices and Container apps ! Hope you are having fun with it too 😉
It’s a year full of misery with the Covid-19 virus around the world. People who lose their loved one, It’s a very sad time for all of us! Microsoft technologies are still going on strong with new features in Azure Cloud Services but also supporting the people who are working in the healthcare, data analytics, Microsoft Teams for Collaboration and much more. But what I want to say to all HealthCare people over the world : THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ALL THE WORK YOU DO 👍
I have deep respect for you all !
Community, Microsoft Product Teams, MVP Lead, WIndows Insiders, I wish you and your family happy holidays and a Healthy 2021 with lot of Success! 🎄😍
Windows Admin Center is a locally deployed, browser-based app for managing Windows servers, clusters, hyper-converged infrastructure, as well as Windows 10 PCs. It comes at no additional cost beyond Windows and is ready to use in production. If you want to work more secure with Windows Server Core images without the GUI or with Microsoft Azure Stack HCI operating system then Windows Admin Center is the tool for the Administrator to manage your workloads on-premises or in the Cloud. You have one web based interface for all your Server consoles (MMC) to manage your Hybrid Datacenter.
Here you can read more about Microsoft Windows Admin Center and download the free software.
Get the best with Windows Admin Center Extensions
Windows Admin Center and the Container Extension
When you have installed Microsoft Windows Admin Center you can configure the settings and extensions for your environment. When you want the benefits of the Microsoft azure Cloud Services you can configure your Azure subscription and add the extensions to your Windows Admin Center. There are also Third Party extensions like Dell, DataOn, Fujitsu and more. Here you find more information about how extensions work.
Container Extension
In the following step-by-step guide we will work with the Container Extension of Windows Admin Center on a Windows Server 2019. You have already added the server in WAC and installed the Container extension. In my MVPLAB.CLOUD is that Windows Server 2019 datacenter Starship01.mvplab.cloud. When you open the server you will come in the Overview of the Windows Server:
Click on Containers.
Click on Install for the Docker installation on Starship01.mvplab.cloud.
This will install Docker on the Windows Server 2019 and reboot when it’s ready to use for Containers. From this moment you can work with Windows Containers on the host via Windows Admin Center.
Remote Desktop in Windows Admin Center, the docker host is installed with the Windows Filter by default.
When you want to use Docker Linux Containers with Windows Server 2019 host, you have to configure the Linux kit LCOW with a distro on the host. More info here
Containers on Starship01.mvplab.cloud
To start with containers you can create your own, or pull an image from Docker Hub with Windows Admin Center. In my case I pull Windows Server 2019 ltsc with IIS image.
mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore/iis (Image)
windowsservercore-ltsc2019 (Tag)
Click then on Pull.
Select your image and click on Run.
Give your Container a name and set your settings.
Click on Run.
Click on Containers tab and you will see your running Container
More details you see the IP-Address of the Container.
IIS is running on Windows Server 2019 ltsc in a Docker Windows Container.
That was easy right 😉
Making your Own Docker file with Windows Admin Center Container Extension
When you have your own Github repository with your software, you can make your own docker file and make a docker image on your host for deployment. To show this I have used this sample on Microsoft docs, but you can clone also a github repository and copy the dockerfile on the host.
I copied the dockerfile on the host C:\BuildImage.
—————
# Sample Dockerfile
# Indicates that the windowsservercore image will be used as the base image. FROM mcr.microsoft.com/windows/servercore:ltsc2019
# Metadata indicating an image maintainer. LABEL maintainer=”jshelton@contoso.com”
# Uses dism.exe to install the IIS role. RUN dism.exe /online /enable-feature /all /featurename:iis-webserver /NoRestart
# Creates an HTML file and adds content to this file. RUN echo “Hello World – Dockerfile” > c:\inetpub\wwwroot\index.html
# Sets a command or process that will run each time a container is run from the new image. CMD [ “cmd” ]
In Windows Admin Center comes ITpro world and DevOps world Together in One web based console like with the Container extension. Microsoft is developing really fast in Windows Admin Center to get all the right Feature for ITPro, DevOps and SecOps Administrators in one place. Awesome are the Windows Admin Center Extensions, developers makes these better and better to do the job for Administrators 🚀
Windows Server 2019 Core and Azure Stack HCI are Operating systems without a GUI, and with Windows Admin Center they are really good to manage, update and keeping in control of security.
I like Windows Admin Center a lot and it Rocks for managing your hybrid Datacenter 😉
Send your comments and feedback via Microsoft GitHub repoby opening a new issue for the Container Extension. Follow @vrapolinario on Twitter
You can Follow Windows Admin Center here on Twitter : @servermgmt
Now is the time. Join your global partner community for the Microsoft Inspire digital event experience. Register today and get ready to extend your partner network as we explore what’s coming in the year ahead and work together to find shared solutions for our customers. Join Microsoft Inspire 2020 Global Event on July 21-22 Now at no Cost!
You will be Inspired by Microsoft New Technologies and Innovations !
Microsoft Azure Arc Servers On-Premises and Azure Cloud Services
Earlier I wrote a blogpost about Microsoft Azure Arc services installation to manage on-premises Servers with Azure Cloud Services, like Azure Monitor and Azure Security Centre from the Cloud.
Here in this post you will see the Newest Microsoft Azure Cloud Services to Manage and Monitor your Servers on-premises with security and compliance included.
Azure Arc Extensions settings of the Server.
Here you can see we have installed the Microsoft Monitoring Agent for Azure Monitor and log analytics, second we have installed the dependency Agent for Windows for
insights, Performance and Service maps. Here you find more information about Virtual machine extension management with Azure Arc for servers (preview)
After initial deployment of the Azure Arc for servers (preview) Connected Machine agent for Windows or Linux, you may need to reconfigure the agent, upgrade it, or remove it from the computer if it has reached the retirement stage in its lifecycle. You can easily manage these routine maintenance tasks manually or through automation, which reduces both operational error and expenses.
The Azure Arc Insights Performance monitor is there by default and installed with the following dashboards :
CPU Utilization
Available Memory
Logical disk IOPS
Logical disk MB/s
Logical disk Latency
Max logical disk used %
Bytes Sent Rate
Bytes Received Rate
Azure Arc Logs Analytics
Of course you can make your own custom Dashboards in the Azure Portal with your own triggers, so in this way you get the same Azure Monitor Innovative Tools for your On-Premises Servers. 😉
Within Microsoft Azure Arc Insights, you can also see a Service Map of the Server
Here is were the dependency agent comes in, you get a service map of the Server and see the communication lines with other resources. In this picture you see Server Yoda01 a Domain Controller of my MVPLAB.
You can see that there are three Clients are logged on the domain controller.
Microsoft Azure Security Center for Azure Arc Servers
One of the most powerful and important features of Microsoft Azure Cloud platform is Security! Microsoft Azure Security Center (ASC) is a unified infrastructure security management system that strengthens the security posture of your data centers, and provides advanced threat protection across your hybrid workloads in the cloud – whether they’re in Azure or not – as well as on premises.
Here you see my Azure Arc Servers (On-Premises) in Azure Security Center.
Azure Arc Server in Azure Security Center recommendations Summary
Five security assessments passed the test, but Azure Security assessment has two recommendations one is Medium Risk and one low.
Here you see the Security advise and the Remediation to take action on your Server.
Microsoft Azure Security Center Overview with the Overall Secure Score.
Security controls – Each control is a logical group of related security recommendations, and reflects your vulnerable attack surfaces. A control is a set of security recommendations, with instructions that help you implement those recommendations. Your score only improves when you remediate all of the recommendations for a single resource within a control.
To immediately see how well your organization is securing each individual attack surface, review the scores for each security control.
To get your Azure Arc Servers (On-premises) complaint for the business and security, you can use Microsoft Azure Arc Policies
Azure Arc Policies to meet your Compliance state.
Conclusion
Microsoft is bringing Azure Cloud Power tools everywhere with Azure Arc Services to give you modern tools like Azure Monitor and Azure Security Center to keep you in control, Secure and Compliant for your business. Keep following Microsoft for Hybrid IT Management, because more awesome features are added every day in Microsoft Azure Cloud Services. Let’s start to get your Azure Security Score UP and UP 😉
