With the recent release of Server 1709 (and the fact that it’s Server Core only), Microsoft have also recently released a preview of a new server management product. This product is currently code-named ‘Project Honolulu’, and is a light-weight web-based management console for Windows Server. Details of the original preview release can be found here.

In the past, when you wanted to manage remote servers (and especially Server Core instances), you either had to:

• RDP in to configure it
• Enable WinRM and use remote powershell
• Enable WinRM and use a remote Server Manager instance from Server 2012 R2 or Server 2016

Depending on what you were trying to achieve, you also may have had to use remote consoles like Computer Management, Event Viewer, Storage Management, Certificate Management, Firewall Management – none of which are built in to Server Manager, but can be launched from there.

Based on initial impressions of Project Honolulu, it looks like Microsoft is trying to improve that experience, and it looks like they’re actually moving in the right direction.

As you can see from the above image, they’ve actually rolled a bunch of the above tools into a single interface – and the really surprising part, is that it’s actually fast. Not like Server Manager where sometimes it can take quite a while to refresh or load.

Obviously it’s not a complete product yet, and there’s a bunch of stuff in Server Manager that it would be nice to see in Honolulu – mostly around dashboards, additional tool sets (Active Directory tools, for example), and additional functionality in the existing tools.

Some of the things I found quite good with Honolulu:

• The speed of loading remote information (event logs, services, etc)
• The ability to remotely import a certificate PFX file without having to resort to painful powershell commands and scripts!
• Set basic IP config on a remote server
• Remote process monitor (graphical – not tasklist.exe!)
• Remote storage management without setting up additional firewall rules
• Virtual Machine dashboards/management. I haven’t had too much of a play with this so I’d say there’s stuff missing, but what’s there is actually quite good.
• Remote Windows Update management (for those of you not using SCCM/WSUS to automate update installation)

Things it can’t do yet, but I’m hoping they add in:

• Dashboards for overall status of servers
• Search function for Registry viewing/editing
• More settings for Services (eg: Logon details)
• Editing of certificate private key permissions
• Additional remote tools – such as Active Directory Users and Computers, DHCP, DNS, Remote Access Management, IIS, etc

If you’re interested in trying out Project Honolulu, it can be downloaded here. Installation instructions can be found here. To be honest, it’s a super simple setup – whether that changes in the future is yet to be seen!.

Note: remote management via Honolulu does require Windows Management Framework 5.0, so you’ll need to install that on non-2016 servers.