Windows Server administrators should get familiar with PowerShell. An OMS agent resides on the Linux servers managed by the Microsoft tool.

For example, with Azure Automation DSC, administrators can connect Linux VMs to a cloud-based DSC pull server and send configurations to the servers with far fewer headaches than doing so on premises.Īdministrators can also use Operations Management Suite (OMS), which some in IT call System Center in the cloud, to analyze logs, manage patches and monitor VM lifecycle health. Microsoft Azure offers many tools to manage Linux servers. Figure 1: Administrators can run PowerShell cmdlets on Linux servers, such as this CentOS 7 system. Windows systems administrators can use ordinary PowerShell syntax to administer Linux servers locally or remotely, and can deploy and manage Linux servers with PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC).įigure 1 shows a CentOS 7 server running PowerShell commands that, until recently, only worked in Windows. In response, the company open sourced the PowerShell scripting and task management framework on GitHub in 2016, and made it available for most major Linux distributions, such as CentOS 7. PowerShell version 6.0 for LinuxĪ significant percentage of Microsoft enterprise customers use Linux in addition to Windows Server. Microsoft updated PowerShell in August 2016 to give it cross-platform management capabilities, for example. It is only a matter of time before the IT department needs to know how to manage Linux servers along with the Windows boxes.Ī Windows administrator can learn how to monitor and manage Linux servers with numerous tools and other resources. A third Microsoft Azure workloads run on some Linux distribution, and Microsoft plans to bring the Windows Subsystem for Linux to Windows Server.

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