Probably you don’t even know the feature Microsoft will retire in a few days … to be fair it still was in preview…
but R.I.P
Server Management Tools in Azure (SMT)
At last years Microsoft Ignite in Atlanta i was staffing the SMT booth together with Samuel Li and other guys from Microsoft (e.g. Ned Pyle :-)) and we really proudly presented what was possible so far. We told our customers how great this tool is and many of them were really interested. But now…SMT will be retired on June 30th.
hy? How? Now? … keep on reading
Server Management Tools in Azure are a solution to bring typical Server Management Task to a HTML5 dashboard in the Azure Portal.
To achieve this there is a gateway system in your existing infrastructure which establishes the connection between SMT and Azure. The important thing: There are only outgoing ports required for this. And all management tasks are proxied through the gateway…so they are executed under a management user and directed to the target servers.
As soon as a gateway is up and running you can add your first server target. After connecting this you have several management tasks provided by SMT:
There are some ideas behind SMT. First there was the approach to build a solution which is able to manage multi-cloud and multi-environment infrastructures. In an ever growing landscape of public cloud environments this is absolutely neccessary.
Also many customers were asking for a RSAT-Tools for Linux and / or MACOS… With SMT, which is running in a HTML5 dashboard you can do administrative tasks unless of your operating system. Only thing required is a HTML5-compatible browser.
Antoher important point is management of Nano server (also in Azure), because this server does not have any management interface. Also the ability to connect external admins to SMT i a huge benefit. So you could delegate administrative Tasks without handing over login credentials…
The retirement of the preview is based on customer feedback like written in the official article. The new effort should go for an on-premises solution…
Based on this top customer request and other market dynamics, we have adjusted our strategy to focus on an on-premises, disconnected solution. This work is well under way, and we will share details and availability later this year.
So while SMT is retired and a new solution is not there now..we have to fall back to RSAT-Tools or so…
Later we can hope for a cool On-Premises solution
If this will be delivered with the same cool HTML5 interface, this could be the next big step. Not to mention, that you could run this in an Azure Virtual Machine
So let’s wait for it
P.S.: a comeback of SMT is still possible…
Although our new investments are focused around a locally-deployed solution, we may reintegrate with Azure again in the future. We’ll be listening closely to your feedback.
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