Microsoft releases Windows Admin Center 1809.5 for Insiders - here's what's new

Microsoft has made Windows Admin Center 1809.5 Preview available for Insiders. This is a cumulative update for version 1809 which has been generally available since September, and as such it doesn't include major features coming from that release. This is the first Insider release in a while, though, as the program hasn't been very consistent in terms of updates.

Version 1809.5 does include a handful of improvements, especially to hyper-converged infrastructure. Here's what's new:

General

Accessibility improvements

Notification message improvements

Certificate handling improvements for upgrades

New splash screen when loading Windows Admin Center

Hyper-V

Add/remove virtual disk or drive for running VMs

VM Connect web console now works in the Virtual Machines tool on Failover Cluster and HCI Cluster connections

VM state refresh time is improved on Windows Server 2019 HCI clusters

Azure Site Recovery protection status is shown for VMs across all cluster nodes

VM health alerts now show VM name instead of VM ID

Clustering

UI improvements for Cluster Aware Updating

Extension Manager

User-installed extensions are persisted across Windows Admin Center upgrades

Increased resiliency against extension errors

Hyper-converged infrastructure

There are several notable new features for hyper-converged infrastructure:

Multi-select bulk actions for drives, volumes, and servers

With full support for shift/ctrl + click keyboard shortcuts, confirmation dialogs, and improved notifications. For example, you can now delete multiple volumes with just one click:

Monitor storage per-server

How much storage capacity is used per server, and how much needs to repair (normal after restarting), is now visible on the Server detail. Now you can track exactly how resync is progressing without relying on Get-StorageJob!

Better network activity monitoring

The Server detail page now has separate charts for non-RDMA and RDMA networking, each showing inbound and outbound traffic separately (summed over all adapters in the server).

In addition to the new features described above, this update also brings many other minor fixes and improvements throughout HCI.

This release seems to simply be an early look at the improvements ahead of general availability, so there are no known issues to be aware of. If you're interested, you can download it from the Windows Insider page, under 'Additional downloads'.