The dashboard section of Server Manager shows you the state of your servers at a glance. The dashboard
uses a 10-minute polling cycle so it’s not a live monitoring solution
like the System Center Operations Manager, but it does give you a
general picture of what’s happening with each server role in your
environment. For example, in the following screenshot, the tile for the
DNS role indicates an alert in the Best Practices Analyzer results for
the DNS Server role:
Clicking the alert brings up the details of the alert, indicating a
possible problem with the configuration of one of the DNS servers in
the environment:
The Local Server section of Server Manager lets you view and configure various settings on your local
server. You can also perform various actions on the local server, or on
other servers in the available pool, by using the Manage and Tools
menus. For example, you can add new roles or features to a server by
selecting Add Roles And Features from the Manage menu:
The Select Destination Server page of the new Add Roles And Features Wizard lets you select either a server from the server pool or an offline VHD as your destination server. The ability to provision roles and features directly to offline VHDs is a new feature of Windows Server 2012 that helps administrators deploy server workloads in virtualized data centers:
The All Servers section of Server Manager displays the pool of servers available for management. Right-clicking a server lets you perform different administrative tasks on that server:
To populate the server pool, right-click All Servers in Server
Management and select Add Server from the shortcut menu. Doing this
opens the Add
Servers dialog box, which lets you search for servers in Active
Directory, either by computer name or IP address or by importing a text
file containing a list of computer names or IP addresses. Once you’ve
found the servers you want to add to the pool, you can double-click
them to add them to the Selected list on the right:
Servers are often better managed if they are grouped together according to their function, location, or other characteristics. Server Manager lets you create custom groups of servers from your server
pool so that you can manage them as a group instead of individually. To
do this, select Create Server Group from the Manage menu at the top of Server
Manager. Doing this opens the Create Server Group dialog box, which
lets you specify a name for the new server group and select multiple
servers from your server pool to add to the group:
Once you’ve added servers to your new group, you can select multiple
servers in your group and perform actions on them such as restarting:
The Tools menu at the top of Server Manager can be used to start other management tools, such as MMC consoles. However, as the new Server
Manager of the Windows Server platform evolves toward a true
multiserver management experience, such single-server MMC consoles will
likely become tightly integrated into Server Manager. With Windows
Server 2012, such integration is already present for two roles: Remote
Desktop Services and file
and storage management. For example, by selecting File And Storage
Services, you can manage the file servers, storage pools, volumes,
shares, and iSCSI virtual disks in your environment:
