 Right, okay, we're in. So welcome to the latest episode of From the Rock to the Cloud. As you know, we talk all things Windows Server, specifically discussing exciting topics around our technology that basically most of us didn't even know existed. So yeah, we're going to talk all about something very exciting today. And as always, we've got a very, very special guest. My guest today just found out she grew up on a farm and she's got an amazing tractor tattoo which has just blown me away. Not many people with a tractor tattoo. So she's really, really special and also probably slightly bonkers to put a tractor tattoo on her arm, but the fair play. So we've got Sarah with us, Sarah Lean. So Sarah, you're all the way up in Glasgow, aren't you? How are you getting on today? I'm good. Thanks. Thanks for that introduction, Tom. Yeah, I'm sorry, I apologize. I try to embarrass people as much as possible. It's the time for a whole, whole chat. So Sarah, today we're going to talk about the excitement of Windows Admin Center, which is quite a new sort of innovation. WAC WAC, as it's known. So we're going to talk WAC or we're not going to talk WAC, but we're going to talk about WAC today. So Sarah, do you want to just give the audience a little introduction to yourself that's a bit better than mine and just so that we know who you are and why you're qualified to talk to us about WAC today? Yes, so my job at Microsoft is as a senior cloud advocate, which means I help the community understand our technologies and also try and fix some of the issues that you might have. So I'm based in the Azure engineering team. So any of the feedback that you have, I push back to the engineering team and then act as that conduit as well. But before I did this role, I was dyed in the wool, sysadmin, IT Pro used to fight with servers, used to fight with those horrible little server caged nuts and lose blood and sleep over all of that fun stuff. So I've been on that kind of journey from that sysadmin person to someone that looks at the cloud and somewhere in the middle, I think is a nice sweet spot with where I am at, to be honest, Tom. Tom? Cool. Well, I always love talking to people who actually know their shnees, which is brilliant, like I love that. So I'm really, really looking forward to today's topic, which is Windows Admin Sensor. So let's jump right into that. And hopefully, at the end of this episode, no one's putting in the comments that that work. Well, maybe they should say it was WAC. Do you know what I mean? Like fingers crossed. Fingers crossed, people understand the real meaning of WAC after we've had our chat today. So what is Windows Admin Sensor? So Windows Admin Sensor is a GUI-based, browser-based platform where we can do things with Windows Server. So we can do those tasks that we have to do every day, whether it be check event logs, delete or renew certificates, a whole bunch of tasks basically within the Windows Admin Center. So it's a tool set to help you manage your Windows servers. Okay. And it's GUI? Yes. So it's graphical user interface-based. So it's point and click, Tom. So I love that because I'm not a coder. I can't code to save myself. Yeah. So yeah, point and click. Always great. Okay. So nothing to do with Slimer and Ghostbusters. That's fine. It's a graphical interface that people can just use point and click. Got it. Sweet. So it's a GUI interface. And, you know, does it work across on-prem cloud? What's the significance of it? Like, why have we done this? Why have we made this Windows Admin Sensor? What's the benefit? So it's kind of a modernization of the tools that we're used to. So if you've ever used an MMC snapping, so the Microsoft Management Console or the RSAT tools, so the Remote Server Admin tools, I think that's what that meant. People know that they're great tools, but they are a bit clunky and you often have to open multiple Windows all the time in order to manage multiple servers. And I definitely got confused back in the day and sometimes maybe stopped the wrong service on the wrong box. But what the Windows Admin Sensor does is just modernize those tools. It's not entirely a replacement, Tom. There's still some things you'll need to use the MMC snappings for. But the Windows Admin Sensor is the modernized tool. And it can manage your servers regardless of where they are. So they could be on-prem. They could be physical. They could be virtual. They could live in Azure. They could live in other cloud providers. As long as the tool can get access to them on the various different ports that it uses, then you can use this regardless. Cool. So it's basically just an upgraded way of doing the traditional management of single servers, but putting it all into one place. Cool. So something like that is expensive. Is it not expensive? Well, it was, you know, one of the charging people for that. This is entirely free. The only, well, when I say free, you do have to have a Windows Server license or a Windows 10 license. But obviously, if you're looking to manage Windows servers, you've got a Windows Server license, hopefully. So it's completely free if you already have an existing server license or a Windows 10 license. So it's a great addition to your tools. So Microsoft is giving free goo. That's whack. Sorry. I couldn't help it. I couldn't help it not to get it. Sorry. I apologize. I couldn't help myself. So once you've got, sorry, once you've got your Windows Admin Sensor set up, can you extend that? You mentioned third parties or other, you know, other things that you can, not just Windows Server, you can manage other things. Can you get third parties support for it? Like, how does that work? So, yes, you can have what we have called extensions within it. And we have several of our hardware vendors who have created extensions. So people like HP, Fujitsu, Data On, have got extensions that you can help manage some of your hardware as well, which is great. But there's also an SDK available. So if you're a developer, which I'm not, you can actually develop your own extension. So if there's something that the tool doesn't do right now, you can actually build on that ecosystem. And you can contribute that either just internally yourself. So you can build that extension for internal use, or you can actually contribute it to the, the fuller ecosystem and share it with everybody. So there's extendability there if you want to try and build on this tool. So the team are very encouraging for those third party extensions to be built. Sweet. It sounds like we've actually moved a massive step forward in the last few years, but we're starting to think about everything working together and being connected, which is kind of, you know, I'm, I'm learning as we're talking. So this is great. So it just means that like Windows Admin Center is that kind of that one place where, you know, everybody can just pull in all their resources and make it work. Now I've heard that Windows Admin Center uses PowerShell under the hood. First of all, what's this hood that everybody talks about? And that's question one. But then actually, can you use these, you know, can I see these scripts actually working and how, and how it uses them? You know, that's the, I suppose, the question. But first of all, what's this hood? Tell me about the hood. Yeah. So it's really just behind the scenes, Tom. So as we said, it's a graphical user interface. So it's point and click, but behind the scenes is using PowerShell and things like HTTPS, WinRM, WMI queries. So yes, you can actually see some of these PowerShell scripts that you can take and leverage for something else or use them as inspiration to put together your own PowerShell scripts if you need to. So yeah. And do you want me to actually show you this? Do you want me to give you a demo of what Windows Admin Center is and take you through some of this? Well, so you're going to show me under the hood? Well, I'll show you how to use Windows Admin Center. I'll show you some of the awesome features that you talked about. Let's go crazy. Let's do this. Right. Awesome. So here I am in my Windows Admin Center and it's browser based. So I'm looking at a bunch of servers that I have. So I'm managing six or seven servers here. These servers all live in my office. So they're all within a hardware environment here in my office. But you can see I can, I have a list of those servers. I don't have to remember the IP addresses. I don't necessarily even need to remember the server names or even log in to these servers with the password. So the password is kind of stored in Windows Admin Center when you set it up. And then you can start to manage these servers. So I think it's pretty cool. I've been able to do this. As I said, you can manage your servers, whether they're physical hardware, whether they're based on-prem or in the cloud. Now, if we connect to one of these servers, we can start to see what's happening within this server. So once it loads up, we have the overview of what's happening in the server. So we've got like the server name, we've got the operating system version. We've kind of got that task manager view of what's happening to the CPU and the memory, things like that. So it gives us an overview of what's happening to that server without actually connecting into that server via like an RDP tool. Now, the power is down the left hand side of this tool though. So we can see all the different things that you can interact with the server. So again, like I was saying earlier, if you want to check on a certificate, if you want to import a certificate, export a certificate, you can have a look at all of this. You have that same interface. You can interact with the server through Windows Admin Center. So yeah, it's a familiar and easy to understand kind of platform. As you can see, it kind of looks like even server manager that you get on Windows Server. So it's an easy one, I think, to learn and get used to and interact with. We've got obviously network adapter. We can go in and change things here. Probably wouldn't change the IP address remotely. You probably want to actually log on to the box and be there when you're doing it. But you have that interactivity with it. You've also got things like settings. So it uncovers some of your settings as well. So if you wanted to change the power configuration of your server or if you wanted to enable or disable remote desktop, you have that power here as well. So you can see it's quite intensive, and there's quite a lot of features that are serviced up within it. Now, when I talked about the extensions, we do have a plethora of extensions within here. Now, some of them come pre-installed for you. Some of the default ones that you would maybe expect to see. But as you can see here, we have a list of ones that we have, even like we've got the Dell ones. We've got HPE ones. And you can add in obviously your own ones. If you wanted to install an extension that wasn't already installed, it's really easy to do. All you do is find the extension that you want to install from the list. So in this case, I'm going to look at containers. So I click on containers, and then I click on install. And what Windows Admin Center will do is go and find that file or the configuration that needs to download, install that extension. It will refresh itself automatically for you. You don't have to do anything. And then when we start to go back into our servers, if we have a look here, what we'll see is we now have that container blade surfaced up within our server. So we can click on containers. And then we can start to actually do containers. So if you wanted to install containers on this server, it would actually help you walk through that process and have a look at it all. Now, you asked me about the PowerShell scripts. If you click the little PowerShell icon in the top right-hand corner, it will actually surface up all the scripts. And you can see from the list here, we've got a bunch of scripts available. So there's lots there within there. So you can take those scripts, you can copy them, you can paste them, you can change them, you can take them elsewhere. But that's really under the hood, as you said, Tom. So yeah, hopefully that's kind of given you a quick overview and made some more sense of what's actually happening with Windows Admin Center and what I'm talking about. Wow. It's actually incredibly simple interface. I'm super impressed. No, so thanks for showing us that. Everyone's favorite subject when it comes to technology is security. How does Windows Admin Center help with security, I suppose, across an estate of multiple servers, whether they be in the cloud or on-prem? How does it handle that? So it uses HTTPS technology to do that talking, if you want to call it that. Also, as I said, it uses PowerShell, it uses WMI queries over WinRM. We have support for LAPS, which is the local admin password solution. And we have access control based on Active Directory or Azure Active Directory as well. So there's lots of security built in there depending on what aspect of security you're actually concerned about. But yeah, it's built with security in mind, to be honest, Tom. Brilliant. That always gives people a little bit of peace of mind, which is good to know. And so we're talking a lot now, as the world's getting more complicated, we're talking about hyperconverged infrastructure. So can I manage a hyperconverged infrastructure with Windows Admin Center? That's, I suppose, a question that some people might want to know. Yeah, so if you're running that on a Windows Server 2016 box or a 2019 box, absolutely, you can use your HCI interfaces there as well and manage that as well. And when we look to some of the newer technology we've just released, so Azure Stack HCI, you actually have the power within Windows Admin Center. So when you look at Azure Stack HCI, Windows Admin Center is built into that admin experience for you. So if you're going to use that, if you're going to deploy that, then you'll have to get familiar with Windows Admin Center, because those kind of two technologies are based together. So yeah, the HCI piece is absolutely something that we can support and do. Brilliant. And so do you need Windows Admin Center or does it require System Center to work? Is that the two links? What's the story there? So I'm often asked this. A lot of customers have used System Center, the various different platforms around there, and they're great tools, but they're not a replacement. Windows Admin Center does not replace any of your System Center tools. They complement each other, so you can use them side by side, but they're definitely not a replacement. One is not a replacement for the other. Okay, that's cool. And when some people are looking into Admin Center, there's a couple of versions out there. There's, I suppose, the full flavor version, and then there's also a preview version, where people might have come across a preview version. What is the difference? Which one should I use? So when you look at Windows Admin Center, like you said, we have the GA version, which is the generally available version. And that's the production ready environment that is the fully supported, fully stable environment. So you can use that with production support in mind. And the team, if you have any issues, then you can log a support call and things like that. When you look at the preview version, what it's allowing you to do is a crystal ball almost into the future. So the team will use the preview to show you features that they're potentially developing, so that they can get feedback from yourself or features that they have been developing and are almost ready to go into production. But it's that last stage of testing, they're trying to battle harden those new features. So the preview feature is something you could run. Obviously, I always say with preview features, to be honest, is be mindful that they are preview, so they might be buggy, they might be unstable, and they might not even release some of the features that are in a preview to production. So don't get too attached to things within preview. And if you are using a preview feature, I always say give feedback back as well, because that's why we have the feedback functionality within sort of the preview features, because we want feedback from our customers, our audience, we want to understand if they're the right things that we're going down, if there's additional features. So it depends on your appetite for risk a wee bit, to be honest, Tom. If you're happy using something that isn't fully productionized and could be buggy and might give you some issues. I'll use the normal version, I'll use the normal version there. So yeah, but either could be run, just be aware that obviously the full fat kind of general available version is production ready, whereas the preview one might not be fully production ready. Okay, that's, it's funny, I'm seeing there's a theme coming through here. We talked to Thomas as well, who I know, you know, and he was talking about wizards. And you've mentioned GUI, which in my head, I'm like Ghostbusters, and then you're talking about like Crystal Falls, which I'm like, you know, like, I'm sort of, you know, seeing, you know, Shrek and the fairy godmother from Shrek. I just kind of see all of this stuff as like magic. Do you know what I mean? And it just works, which I love. So sorry, tenuous link. But say I can use Windows Admin Center with Azure. Is that possible as well? Can I just use it with Azure? Like, what's, like, what's the whole tie in with the, because I'm on-prem, I'm managing my servers, but I might want to use some Azure resources, right? So that's the kind of even more magic. How does that work? Yeah, so I think a lot of customers are looking towards potentially leveraging parts of Azure to maybe enhance some of their on-prem environment. So they want to have a management tool that can do both, right? No one likes to use multiple management tools, Tom. We all hate that. We want to get away from that kind of world. And Windows Admin Center is built with that kind of hybrid solution in mind. So what you can do is use some of the tools within Azure to manage your Windows servers. So say, for example, updates. So everyone has to apply updates to the Windows servers. You can manage the Azure updates. We love updates. That's a magic word we don't mention. No, no, no. We love updates. We love updates. So that's a prime example. There's a service in Azure called the Azure Update Management Service where you can automate the patching of your servers, which is great. But you can manage that within Windows Admin Center as well. You don't have to go to the Azure portal to do all of that configuration. So yeah, there's definitely a tie in there if you're starting to look at adding features and functionality from Azure to your on-prem environment. Windows Admin Center can help be that conduit to get to that. I can actually show you a demo of us creating an Azure virtual machine from within Windows Admin Center, if you want, Tom. Go for it. Let's do it. I love it when this happens. Let me fire it up. So I will say this is a demo because it takes a few minutes to actually do and no one wants to sit and watch a live virtual machine being created. So let me fire up the video and we'll get this started, Tom. Yeah, that's cool. Get the crystal ball. So again, we're in the Windows Admin Center console here and I'm just showing you that this is connected to Azure. And basically, I just had to sign in with my username and password to register this Windows Admin Center with my Azure subscription. But as I said, what we can actually do here is create a virtual machine from within Windows Admin Center in Azure. So we can add in here if we go down to the very bottom. And what we'll be walking through as a wizard, Tom, you'll get those questions that you will get when you're creating a virtual machine within Azure. So you'll be asked about the resource group that you want to put this virtual machine in. You'll be asked the name and the region that you want to store this virtual machine in. The same kind of questions you get when you do it within the Windows Admin Portal. So I'm going to build a 2019 data center core virtual machine. I put in my username and password. Hopefully very secure username and password here. I get to choose the size. So I'm just going to pick the smallest size because it's core. So it should run on a very small one here. I also have the option here to actually domain join it. So if you're domain joining your servers, then you can do this from this wizard as well. So it's great from that point of view. And it saves you having to do that manual step yourself. Now it does take a few minutes for this to go and deploy that virtual machine into your Azure environment. But once it's complete, we can actually go into the Azure Portal and start to interact with that virtual machine. Or we can actually add it in here to the Windows Admin Center console and start to manage it just like any other server within our environment. So there you go. That's that virtual machine created. Now what I want to show you is a cool new feature that we have released and it's a preview feature is actually Windows Admin Center built into the Azure Portal. So if you have virtual machines servers within Azure, you can actually use Windows Admin Center to manage it from within the Azure Portal. Now this is a preview feature and it's exciting to see what the team are doing here. But basically if you still have a look at the screen right now, it's identical to what we've just saw that we had on-prem. Now some of the caveats around this obviously are. It's a preview service and the team are trying to look at how it can help people manage their environment and manage their environment from within Azure. What we saw with our Windows Admin Center on-prem was that we had a list of I think it was six or seven servers I was managing at the time. With this extension within the Azure Portal is you're only managing that one server. So you have to enable Windows Admin Center for all of your servers within Azure. So although that's an extra step, an extra hassle as such to be honest, Tom, it does give you that instant feedback from the server. So if you wanted to do something, here I'm modifying my firewall rightly or wrongly. If I needed to do that quickly on an Azure virtual machine and I didn't have my Windows Admin Center console or my laptop with me, I was sitting in a hotel room or whatever, I can do this from within the Azure Portal. So it's very clever that technology that we have and it's nice to see that the team are again extending the tool that we love Windows Admin Center into Azure and vice versa. You know, we saw earlier on in the demo that Windows Admin Center is extending up to Azure as well. So yeah, that's just a little bit of flavor of Azure and Windows Admin Center. No, I love it so. Well, first of all, there's a wizard in that. So I like to see Dumbledore doing a bit of work for us, which is always great. But I, you know, I like seeing that you've shown us a bit of the future, which is actually, this is the, it's the cloud bit talking to the on-prem bit and then the on-prem bit talking to clouds and the two can cross pollinate. And that I suppose is, you know, that's the future for so many people out there, especially when we think about, you know, edge computing workloads and all of this kind of other stuff that is happening right now in the IT world. What we need is a safe place and the space to be able to do these things and work properly. So if the audience out there want to start this journey on, I suppose, their wizard training, they want to find out more about WAC or Windows Admin Center. Where can they go? Where would you advise them to go and start their journey? So I've created a short URL that you can head off to. So if you go to aka.ms slash server dash WAC, so WAC, it will take you through to the Windows Admin Center documentation. You can have a read some of the features that I maybe haven't mentioned today, and you can also download a copy of it as well and have a play with it. Well, I know what I'm going to be doing tonight. I'm going to be all over that WAC. There we are. Right. Okay. So now we move on to the fun part, Sarah. So this is where the fantastic producers of this live stream slash podcast slash chat like to sort of, I suppose, take almost the mickey out of me a little bit, because I don't really know what I'm talking about and they kind of pull that out. So what we do is we have this thing called the server meme review. So they obviously, they're very down with the kids. I've just turned 40, so not too down with the kids. So they like to, they like to poke fun at me. But what they also know is is that because I'm talking to a server expert, you'll get the meme and I won't. So yeah. Well, fingers crossed, fingers crossed. Now, just for the audience, if you've got a meme that you want to send in or you want to leave a comment, make sure you do underneath this video. And right, Sarah, we're going to have a look at the first meme now. And I suppose let's see what they found for us today. Meme number one. It says, good Lord. I have worked in server rooms that look like that. I suppose, like often I suppose people have that person in the business that they think they can fix things and they go into that room and then they start messing around with some stuff. And then that's the result, right? Yep. That's horrible. That's hurting my eyes. And then they call Sarah and they say, Hey, Sarah, then can we, can we move to the cloud? Now that's that really, that is, that is whack. That's that's that's someone's done a terrible job of they know. Even I know that, that your network cable shouldn't be in that sort of condition. So I can appreciate that. Oh yeah, for a fault. Yeah. All right. Okay. Right. Well, let's have a look at the second one. Let's see what the second meme server meme is. Right. Three, two, one. Here we go. Servers down. I should post memes. Is that cat wearing a suit? It looks like it. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. Well, we've found a meme that basically brings the two most powerful things on the internet servers, because obviously the internet's run by servers and cats, which the two most powerful things on the internet together in one meme. There we are. Have you ever posted a server meme, Sarah? I don't know. Probably not actually. Yeah, I'm not. Yeah, I like looking at memes, but I don't think I post off that many. That's okay. Well, that's your homework for the for this evening. Anyways, to send me send me a meme. Perfect. Well, I think, you know, it's been great chatting to you, Sarah. Just to recap, we've learned about GUI, which is the graphical interface behind WAC, which is Windows Admin Center. It's completely free, which is, you know, we get few enough free things in this world. And you just need to make sure you've got the right licensing behind your licenses for Windows server, which is pretty straightforward. And it can manage anything, whether it be on-prem or in the cloud, Azure, the whole Kaboodle, Kitten Kaboodle, it does the whole lot. It really is sort of the new hybrid landscape for partners to be able to use and do what they need to do. So, look, Sarah, thank you so, so much for today. Really appreciate your time. And I always, like I said, always love talking to you next, but I'm sure that we're going to, well, hopefully one day we can get up to Glasgow and chat in person. That'd be amazing. But in the meantime, you know, I'm sure there'll be another episode with you on it too. And so we look very much forward to having you again if we can. And if you can spare the time, it's been a pleasure talking to you. So, look, everybody, thanks so much for listening to the episode today. Like I said, we've been very, very lucky having Sarah with us. Keep an eye out for future episodes. And if you've got anything you want us to talk about, let us know. We're really interested to know your thoughts and feedback. If you've got any comments, even if you just got a silly meme, send it over to me and make me look stupid. We very much appreciate it. So thanks very much for joining us from the rock to the cloud and look forward to that next episode. Talk to you soon. Cheers. Thanks. Bye.