Extensions in the Windows Admin Center provides you the functionality to manage & monitor your windows servers. So in order to efficiently manage & monitor windows server you should keep your extensions upto date. In this post we will see on How to Install Extensions in Windows Admin Center.
Extensions also you can call it as Tools which allows you to perform actions on your windows servers remotely. All the options or tools which you use to manage your windows servers are extensions in the Windows Admin Center. By installing new extensions you can have more functionalities available for your windows server to perform remotely.
If you haven’t installed Windows Admin Center check our post : How to Install Windows Admin Center Step by Step ?
So let’s see how to Install extensions in Windows Admin Center step by step:
Step 1:
Login to Windows Admin Center.
You will see settings icon at the top right corner of the window.
Click on settings.
Step 2:
In the left navigator tab select Extensions.
Here you can see all the available extensions in Windows Admin Center as well as all the Installed extensions in windows admin center.
Step 3:
From available extensions select the extension which you want to install & click on Install button.
Extension installation will just take few seconds & once installation is finished you can go to Installed extensions & view your installed extension there.
That’s it, Using this way you can easily install extensions in windows admin center. There are many extensions available for installation & there are many pre-installed extensions. So if you want to perform more operations with your servers you can find the extension & you can install it.
Checkout our below posts on Windows Admin Center:
How to Install Windows Admin Center Step by Step ?
How to Add Windows Server in Windows Admin Center Step by Step ?
How to Connect to Windows Server in Windows Admin Center Step by Step ?
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Hi I am Mayur Parmar. Independent Author & Founder of Mastering VMware. I am working in IT industry for more than 4 Years with knowledge of VMware , Microsoft Server’s, Linux Server’s.
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Remember the Active Directory Administrative Center? If you are like me, you didn’t really see many across the enterprise make use of the “next-generation” of Active Directory management. However, there is a new Active Directory Administrative Center that I would like to predict will be the next-generation of managing Active Directory domain resources and that is the Windows Admin Center New Active Directory Extension that is available for Preview in Windows Admin Center. Additionally, if you are looking for Active Directory Administrative Center Windows 10, this is the tool that most likely, will fill this need. Let’s take a look at the Windows Admin Center New Active Directory Extension and see how this new Active Directory extension is installed and used.
As you know, Windows Admin Center can be installed and used on Windows 10 as well as Windows Server operating systems. In fact, you can connect to and have access to many powerful tools in Windows Admin Center on your Windows 10 administrative workstation.
How do you access the Windows Admin Center Active Directory module?
Installing Windows Admin Center New Active Directory Extension
Be sure you are running the latest and greatest Windows Admin Center (1910 at the time of this writing). You can download it here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/windows-admin-center
Once you have the latest Windows Admin Center, navigate to the Settings > Extensions screen. Under the Available extensions, you will see the Active Directory (Preview) listed. Highlight it, and then click the Install button.
Once installed, Windows Admin Center will quickly reload the browser session. Then you will need to connect to a domain controller in your environment to manage. The Active Directory Domain Services only shows up in the context of managing a domain controller with Windows Admin Center. After connecting to a DC, you will see the Active Directory menu listed underneath Tools.
There are several things that stand out here. For one, the large search field allows easily finding objects.
Zooming in a bit further, when we look at the various actions that can be performed, you will see under the Create menu, you can create users, groups, and OUs. Additionally, you have the ability to Disable, Remove, and Reset Password.
Under the More menu, you will notice two options – Properties and Locate.
For one, I love the locate option. How many times have you performed a search in Active Directory Users and Computers and even though the search in ADUC returns the object you are looking for, you may need to see it where it is located. This is not achievable in the default ADUC tools. It is great to see an easy locate feature for any object so you can quickly be taken to the location where the object is housed.
Additionally, if you look at the Properties screen, you will see a good bit of functionality here. You get the basic properties of the user that can be modified such as the typical name, SAMaccountname, UPN suffix, password options, account expiration and others.
Also, if you look at the Membership menu, you will quickly get to see which groups the user object is a member of. Additionally, I really like the search menu that is found on these pages that allows quickly filtering down to see the exact object you are looking forward. Instead of having to scroll through a list of groups in the user properties like ADUC, you can quickly use the search menu and determine if the user is a member of a particular group or not.
Still in Preview
The Windows Admin Center New Active Directory Extension is a great new extension to be found for use with Windows Admin Center. Keep in mind this extension is still in Preview form as are many other Windows Admin Center extensions. Why should you still get excited about this new extension if you are an Active Directory administrator?
As you have no doubt noticed, Microsoft is going “all in” on Windows Admin Center and I can say that it has kept me pleasantly surprised. I think it is turning out to be great platform that has been introduced at the right time. It will certainly be the one tool that Microsoft settles on for day-to-day management of Windows Server environments, including Active Directory.
The seeming lack of features at this stage should not be alarming. It is not close to ADUC or other tools in its current form, however, you can expect to see this new Active Directory extension rapidly gain new features. I suspect Microsoft will also bring in the functionality of other consoles like Active Directory Domains and Trusts as well as Sites and Services eventually.
Concluding Thoughts
The Windows Admin Center New Active Directory Extension is certainly the new active directory administrative center with great new features no doubt to come. It is most definitely worth downloading and getting familiar with.
Expect it to rapidly gain features and functionality as Microsoft ramps up all of the Windows Admin Center tools to become viable replacements for all the legacy management consoles we have used for the past decade.
Brandon Lee is the Senior Writer, Engineer and owner at Virtualizationhowto.com, and a 7-time VMware vExpert, with over two decades of experience in Information Technology. Having worked for numerous Fortune 500 companies as well as in various industries, He has extensive experience in various IT segments and is a strong advocate for open source technologies. Brandon holds many industry certifications, loves the outdoors and spending time with family. Also, he goes through the effort of testing and troubleshooting issues, so you don’t have to.
Hello Windows Insiders! Thanks for staying up to date on the Windows Admin Center journey! This release contains incremental changes and quality improvements for the new functionality released in the preceding previews. Specific updates to Packetmon, and a couple visual changes are described below.
This will be the last preview release in anticipation of the next generally available release of Windows Admin Center coming in the next two months.
Specific connection type for Azure VMs
In new Add connection experience, Azure VMs are now a top-level connection type. This functionality previously lived under the “Azure” tab when adding a server. When a server is added this way, it appears in the connections list as “Server (Azure VM)” so you can easily see which of your servers are Azure VMs.
Unified connection type for clusters
The two separate connection types for hyper-converged clusters and failover clusters have been merged into a single, unified connection type. Clusters can be added as a “Windows Server cluster” and the appropriate tools will be loaded and available, primarily based on whether Storage Spaces Direct is enabled or not. Hyper-converged cluster connections and failover cluster connections added from previous versions of Windows Admin Center will be automatically migrated to the new cluster connection type.
For extension developers: Extensions that enable tools for failover cluster connections and/or hyper-converged cluster connections will require a minor code change to display the tools properly in the new cluster connection. Details on this will be provided soon.
Packetmon
There are several improvements in Packetmon:
- New capture dialog wizard – users need to follow several steps to set the capture conditions: select specific components, set filters, choose dropped or all packets
- Capture conditions button – opens a dialog which shows the conditions used to create the capture
- Restart button – reuse same conditions to restart capture
- Display filters dialog – further filter captured results
- Save button – save the captured log in different formats
- Packet details page now shows actual names of networking stack components
Partner extensions
The Windows Admin Center ecosystem continues to grow with the recent release of several partner extensions.
IIS extension
We are excited to announce the first preview release of the IIS Extension for Windows Admin Center that provides the existing tools in IIS manager to administer and manage your web server. You can download and install the “msft.iis.iis-management” extension from the extension feed and If you are connecting to a machine to manage IIS for the first time, you will be prompted to install the IIS Administration API on the machine you wish to manage.
Lenovo XClarity Integrator extension is generally available
The Lenovo XClarity Integrator extension is now generally available with the v1.2.11 release. In addition to the existing capabilities to manage standalone servers and hyper-converged clusters, the following features have been added in this release:
- In-band management for hardware inventory, events and alerts – Servers can be managed via PowerShell running in Windows Server. This allows server hardware management without the Lenovo XClarity Administrator.
- Support for Lenovo XClarity Administrator version 2.5.0 for out-of-band management.
BiitOps Changes extension for server configuration change tracking
The BiitOps Changes extension is now officially available for customers. BiitOps Changes makes identifying and troubleshooting server incidents through Windows Admin Center an even quicker and simpler process through a powerful graphical change overview. Key features include:
- Summarizes changes made to servers and/or services leading up to an incident
- Shows changes – and changes only – in a simple, yet powerful graphical interface
- Allows admins to quickly zoom in on specific changes for full details
- Simple one-time installation, configuration and deployment for 24/7/365 monitoring
- Highly secure with no data ever being passed from your local installation
- Offered as a free trial for up to 10 servers
Learn more about BiitOps Changes here.
Known issues
- Dell EMC extension – The Dell EMC OpenManage Integration extension is not compatible with Windows Admin Center v1909 due to a breaking change in this version and will fail to install. Dell EMC will be releasing a new version soon. In the meantime, you can continue to use the Dell EMC extension on Windows Admin Center v1904.1 or v1908.
- Cluster connections – When adding a cluster connection, there is reference to creating a new cluster, however this functionality is not yet available. [23380016]
- Azure Monitor onboarding – If you’re managing a server or a cluster using “manage as” credentials, the onboarding may fail.
- Network – If you have configured an Azure Network Adapter, the value under Microsoft Azure Virtual Network Gateway Address will be formatted as a hyperlink but leads to an invalid address. [20420185]
- Chrome users may see 403 Forbidden response from WAC after upgrading. The workaround is to close *all* open chrome tabs (make sure there are no chrome.exe processes running). After restarting chrome, everything will function normally. We have an error message that makes this clear, but chrome users with multiple windows admin center tabs open during upgrade will not see the message.
How to Download
Registered Insiders may download Windows Admin Center Preview 1909 directly from the Windows Server Insider Preview download page, under the Additional Downloads dropdown. If you have not yet registered as an Insider, see Getting Started with Windows Server on the Windows Insiders for Business portal.
We value your feedback!
The most important part of a frequent release cycle is to hear what’s working and what needs to be improved, so your feedback is extremely valued. Send us feedback via UserVoice. We also encourage you to visit the Windows Admin Center space on the Microsoft Tech Communities forum to collaborate, share and learn from experts.
Terms of Use
All pre-release software made available to you via the Windows Server Insider program are governed by the Insider Terms of Use.
Thanks,
Dona and Brandon