What is Windows Admin Center?
Microsoft Windows Admin Center (WAC) is a graphical user interface tool for your Windows servers.
It’s widely supported on Windows 10 & 11, Windows Server 2012, 2016, 2019, and 2022.
Windows Admin Center should be used instead of Remote Desktop to connect to your servers as it can connect to multiple server instead of one by one.
It runs inside a web browser which mean you can access it inside any client machine you have including tablets and mobile devices.
You can manage and configure your local windows 10, 11 machines but it’s widely used as server management tool to manage remote servers.
Typically you’re going to run it as Admin Center Gateway, you will have HTTPS connection to this gateway which in turn will manage the other servers.
Admin Center Gateway uses WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) which is part of PowerShell to send commands to other servers in order to configure them remotely.
You can add new server to the gateway’s lit cluster to be managed.
Leave Allow Windows Admin Center to modify this machine’s trusted hosts settings checked. it means Windows Admin Center wants the capabilities to change local trusted hosts in order to setup security and access to do these configurations properly.
Use WinRM over HTTPS only. If you want to ensure that you only use TLS/SSL for your HTTP connection with WindRM (Windows Remote Management) which is the protocol that WMI(Windows Management Instrumentation) uses to configure remote servers.
Windows Admin Center site runs on port 443. you can choose a different port if you want but you’ll need to include that port in the URL.
Typically in a production environment, you’re going to have your own SSL certificates, then upload it.
You can force port 80 to redirect over to HTTPS.
