Checking out Windows Admin Center 1903 – DHCP, DNS, and Active Directory Previews #MVPHour

Hey Checkyourlogs Fans,

Tonight, I wanted to checkout some of the brand new previews that are now available inside of Windows Admin Center Insiders Build 1903. I have been waiting for a long time for the ability to manage DHCP, DNS, and Active Directory so let’s see how this goes.

Step 1 – You need to Install the new Preview Extensions after you upgrade or install Windows Admin Center 1903.

Here is the install in progress.

After I installed the extensions, Windows Admin Center reloaded the main page.

First up is the Active Directory Extension. It is really responsive. I searched for my name in Active Directory, and query results were nearly instant.

As you can see you can Enable, Disable, Remove, Reset Password, and check properties on the user objects.

This is an early preview so don’t expect everything to be super polished yet, but it is a HUGE step in the right direction for Windows Admin Center.

Next up, DNS… well. DNS wasn’t quite as responsive in my preliminary testing.

Tick Tock, 3 minutes later…. I’m too impatient moving on. (It is ok buddy we will check you out later when I have more time to write about this.

DHCP… was much faster, and the UI was quite impressive at first glance.

I could see an existing Scope, and I could create new ones.

For DHCP Scope management I had pretty much all the features I needed out of the box to do basic management.

I could edit the scope, deactivate the scope, add reservations. I couldn’t figure out how to get into see the leases which was kind of annoying but I know that functionality will be coming soon.

I hope you enjoyed my preview look at Windows Admin Center 1903.

Thanks,

Dave