What to expect in the new WAC Storage Extension and where to get yours now

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HPE maintains a strong effort in integration development, formal testing, and deployment guidance around our Microsoft solutions to help enable fast, easy installs and successful tech interoperability for all our HPE Hybrid Cloud and Storage products. And hybrid cloud is the key word there, because pretty much all our customers are managing a mix of on-prem and cloud-based resources, and thus require management ‘panes of glass’ that span both.

This week we released an update to our Windows Admin Center (WAC) storage extension software. It’s a key piece of our Microsoft hybrid cloud effort that lets customer IT teams seamlessly bridge their on-prem data center with the Azure cloud.

HPE Storage Manager 1.1.30 released September 10, 2024, and enables the management of a broad line of HPE Storage within the WAC console. This update expands the supported arrays to include HPE Alletra 6000, HPE Alletra 9000 and the new HPE Alletra Storage MP systems.  The software is available for free to all HPE Storage hardware customers.

Do you wanna know what's really WAC?

Windows Admin Center is a locally-deployed, browser-based management tool that enables management of Windows clients, servers and clusters, including Azure Stack HCI clusters.  WAC provides control over infrastructure and is particularly useful for managing servers on private networks not connected to the Internet, though WAC can also view resources in Azure. Thus WAC is an important evolution from classic tools like Server Manager and MMC, bringing Microsoft resource management into the Cloud computing era.

We’re told by Microsoft that the majority of the Fortune 500 are using WAC, with a key usage being around Hyper-V virtual machine related management.

WAC Extensions make the platform extensible to system partners in order to integrate with other products, including Storage arrays, thus providing extra value to customers and making admins more productive. Rather than seeing a very basic view of infrastructure devices, with the extension, Infrastructure admins can see and in some cases manage specific array features, details, health and performance status from within the WAC console, without having to flip to a separate Storage element manager.

Detailed features and benefits of the updated WAC Storage Extension

The HPE Storage Extension software package includes both the HPE Storage connection and HPE Storage tool extensions. This one storage extension conveniently enables the management of a number of HPE Storage systems: HPE 3PAR, HPE Primera, HPE Nimble Storage, HPE Alletra 6000, HPE Alletra 9000, and HPE Alletra Storage MP.

The new HPE Alletra Storage MP is a big step forward in data storage design – a disaggregated scale-out block storage system that scales up to over 5PBs capacity, uses all-NVMe media for high performance and low latency, and comes with a 100% data availability guarantee.

The extension presents storage resource info to the WAC console, including the array(s), components, performance and capacity metrics. Specific resource data is presented by array system, controllers, and storage, down to the network device and data storage volumes. Specific metrics and elements will differ across the HPE storage systems. Details are available in the download release notes.

To get your own free update of the HPE WAC Storage Extension, go to the following location and download the software:  https://dev.azure.com/WindowsAdminCenter/Windows%20Admin%20Center%20Feed/_artifacts/feed/WAC/NuGet/hpe.storage-manager/overview/1.1.30

Info on all our HPE Hybrid Cloud solutions for Microsoft is available online at HPE.com/Storage/Microsoft