The Administration Server is a specially configured Web Server instance on which the administration applications are deployed. An administration server runs on each node in the server farm. Of these servers, one server is configured to be the master server (Administration Server) and the rest are configured to be slave servers. Each of the slave servers is referred to as an Administration Node.
The HTML driven administration server is redesigned to make common tasks easier to access and complex tasks easier to accomplish.
New features in the Administration Server are as follows:
Web-based wizards for performing the most common tasks
Enhanced command-line interface (CLI) support for server configuration and administration tasks
Administration Node to manage remote Web Server instances
Centralized configuration store
Support for deploying Web Server configuration information on multiple machines (nodes). This feature extends to support Web Server in a server farm (clusters).
Built-in management and monitoring of server clusters