Earlier today, Microsoft released Windows Server 2019 Insider Preview build 17692, and in the blog post, it linked to another blog post about Windows Admin Center Insider Preview 1806. Curiously, the link didn"t work at the time, but now, the company formally announced the new preview.
Penned by Brandon LeBlanc and Insider chief Dona Sarkar, the announcement outlines two branches: Preview and GA. The current GA (general availability) version is 1804.25, but for Preview, this is the first in a series of monthly releases. The Preview branch should still be production-ready, but there will be some features that are labeled as a preview.
Here"s a summary of the new features included in today"s release:
View/copy the PowerShell scripts that Windows Admin Center is using under the hood. (Our top user request!)
Manage Windows Server 2008 R2 connections with a limited set of tools (another big customer request)
New tools to manage your Software Defined Network (SDN) in Hyper-Converged Cluster Manager
New Scheduled Tasks tool (in preview; see below for known issues)
Other new features include an update notification dialog, multiple extension feeds, and a new option to redirect web traffic from port 80. See below for details.
Improvements to some existing features: gateway settings page, notifications, connection tag editing experience, and extension management experience
There are also some known issues to be aware of:
Windows Server 2008 R2 connections – The remote desktop tool is currently not available due to a bug in the HTML RD client.
Scheduled Tasks – Lack of form validation and error message formatting.
SDN – SDN environments with Kerberos authentication for Northbound communication are not supported in this preview.
VMs on HCI – Connecting virtual machine to an SDN logical network is not supported in this preview release.
For more details on all of the listed features, you can check out the announcement from today. To download Windows Admin Center Insider Preview 1806, you can find it here.