NEW: Integrate HPE Nimble Storage into Windows Admin Center

MassimilianoG

Today, technology touches every part of a business. But even as IT becomes more powerful and pervasive, it also becomes more complex. At the same time, most businesses are attempting to keep IT budgets and headcounts flat to remain more competitive. How can a business satisfy all these competing priorities? The answer is to find solutions that simplify management so existing staff can do more with less.

Windows Admin Center (WAC) is one of these solutions. IT admins used to have to use dozens of different management consoles on any given day. WAC brings together multiple consoles into a modernized, simplified, integrated, and secure remote-management experience. It enables browser-based management of Windows Server 2019 servers, clusters, hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), and Windows 10 PCs. It can also connect on-premises servers with cloud services via integration with Microsoft Azure. Even better, this is a free download from Microsoft that installs in fewer than five minutes and can be used immediately, with no additional configuration required.

HPE utilizes iLO technology to provide extensions for WAC that help further simplify monitoring and management by giving customers direct visibility of server-level inventory and diagnostic information to help monitor, manage, and troubleshoot server infrastructure right in WAC. HPE also provides storage extensions for WAC, which enable a single dashboard for Microsoft customers to view and manage storage resources whether on premises or in the Azure cloud.

Just announced in February 2021, the latest release of HPE Windows Admin Center Storage Extensions now includes support for HPE Nimble Storage. Customers can now use WAC to view key metrics for HPE Primera Storage, HPE 3PAR Storage, and HPE Nimble Storage, including general storage system information, health summary, configuration summary, performance metrics—such as IOPs, bandwidth, and latency—and inventory of hardware and logical/storage components. The new Nimble extension enables visibility into hardware components such as arrays, shelves, controllers, physical disks, power supplies, fans, ports, and network devices. It also visualizes logical/storage components such as pools, folders, and volumes.

More info on the extension, along with all the HPE WAC Extensions (server and storage) is available on the HPE Windows Admin Center Extensions page. The software package itself can be directly downloaded from the WAC Feed.

If you’d like to see it in action, Rambo Wang, technical marketing at HPE, demonstrated how to manage Enterprise Storage infrastructure through WAC, using the recently released extension for HPE Nimble Storage, at a recent Microsoft Ignite session.