Alongside the first Redstone 4 preview of Windows Server, Microsoft today released its second ever preview of Project Honolulu, bringing the build number to 01003. Technical Preview 1709 was released at the company"s Ignite 2017 conference, and this is Technical Preview 1711.
Project Honolulu is described as "a flexible, lightweight browser-based customer-deployed platform and solution for Windows Server management scenarios for troubleshooting, configuration and maintenance."
It"s interesting to see Microsoft using version numbers in its previews for Project Honolulu, which seems much more clear and simple than the build numbers that we"re used to seeing, although they gave us one of those. Version numbers are the year and month, so 1709 means September 2017, and 1711 means November.
Here"s what"s new in Project Honolulu Technical Preview 1711 build 01003:
Remote Desktop
With the remote desktop tool in the Server Manager solution, you can connect to your machine to complete scenarios that are not yet supported natively in Honolulu. If you want to configure a feature that has no GUI tool, connect with Remote Desktop and open PowerShell!
Windows 10 Client Management
You can now add Windows 10 client machines as connections in Honolulu, and manage them with a subset of tools in the “Computer Management” Solution
Switch Embedded Teaming (SET)
Short of SCVMM, there was previously no GUI experience to configure Switch Embedded Teaming (SET), a new feature released in Windows Server 2016. You will find this feature in the Virtual Switches tool.
Data grid performance improvements
We have updated the grid in the Certificates and Events tools to a more performant control which is able to handle large datasets without a loss in performance. In the next release, it will be updated across all tools. In the Events tool, the data is streamed in as it loads, which can lead to a shorter loading time than the in-box tool when working with channels that contain many events.
Removed: LAPS in Service mode
We have removed the ability to use LAPS when Project Honolulu is deployed as a Server service. You may still use LAPS when you install Honolulu on Windows 10.
There are also some known issues to be aware of, which only have to do with new features:
Remote Desktop
The Remote Desktop tool does not currently support any text, image, or file copy/paste between the local desktop and the remote session.
To do any copy/paste within the remote session, you can copy as normal (right click + copy or Ctrl+C), but paste requires right click + paste (Ctrl+V does NOT work)
Opening the web browser’s debugger while a Remote Desktop session is active may cause your computer to crash. Don’t do it.
You cannot send the following key commands to the remote session:
Ctrl+Alt+End / Ctrl+Alt+Del
Alt+Tab
Function keys
Windows Key
PrtScn
Windows 10 Client Management
If you try to add a Windows PC connection, but the add connection dialog tries to add it as a server, refresh your browser. If the problem persists, clear your browser cache.
When you try to manage the localhost, you will be prompted to elevate the gateway process. If you click no in the User Account Control popup that follows, Honolulu won’t be able to display it again. In this case, exit the gateway process by right-clicking the Project Honolulu icon in the system tray and choosing exit, then relaunch Project Honolulu from the Start Menu.
Windows 10 does not have WinRM/PowerShell remoting on by default.
To enable management of the Windows 10 Client, you must issue the command Enable-PSRemoting from an elevated PowerShell prompt.
You may need to update your firewall to allow connections from outside the local subnet:
Set-NetFirewallRule -Name WINRM-HTTP-In-TCP –RemoteAddress Any
Switch Embedded Teaming (SET)
When adding NICs to a team, they must be on the same subnet.
As with all networking configuration options in Project Honolulu, configuring this feature will cause a temporary loss in connectivity as the server’s networking stack restarts. This will generate errors that can safely be ignored.
If you"re looking for all known issues, which you"ll probably also want to be aware of, you"ll have to head over to this page. As with Windows Server build 17035, you can find the new Project Honolulu build on the Insider download page.