As we all know that Remoting is a big thing in PowerShell V2, you may not know that the key thing to PowerShell Remoting is the “Sessions”. Session is actually not new at all to PowerShell, it exist in V1 and it doesn’t have to be remote!
Let’s see the below cmdlet
get-service i*
It is running locally but it is a (hidden)session
It is equivalent to the below cmdlet
Invoke-command {get-service i*}
To extend that to a remote computer “whatever”, you do this -
Invoke-command –comutername whatever –command {get-service i*}
What happens here is invoke-command establish a session to remote computer “whatever” and then run the cmdlet get-service on the remote computer and then terminate the session.
Not only you could run cmdlet after invoke-command(established a session), you could run a block of scripts as well.
Now you also can do this -
$sessions= new-PSSession –computername whatever1, whatever2
Basically what it does is establish new (remote)sessions on the remote computer whatever1/2 and make them available to you, so you could run your scripts.
Invoke-command –session $sessions {get-eventlog –log security} |sort *computername*
So the point I am trying to make here is that in PowerShell V2, you use invoke-command cmdlet to connect to multiple remote computers and establish “sessions’ to the remote computer and then you run your cmdlets or scripts blocks. Here are some of the cmdlets related to session – New-PSSession; Get-PSSession; Remove-PSSession. You can get the session related cmdlets by using get-command *-PSSession and then you can use get-help to learn the details.
As we already know that Windows 7 will become generally available on Oct. 22, 2009, and Windows Server 2008 R2 will be broadly available at the same time.
For PowerShell funs, PowerShell V2 will be integrated with Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2! That is, you don’t have to install (XP/Windows 2003) or enable the feature (Vista/Windows Server 2008). It’s installed and enabled for you!
I have been using PowerShell CTP2/3 and running Windows 7 RC recently, therefore effective using PowerShell V2.
PowerShell V1 has very limited remoting capability. For example, you can’t do get-service on remote computer. In order to get remote service status, I have to use these codes -
$HealthService = [System.ServiceProcess.ServiceController]::GetServices($Computername) | where{$_.name -eq 'HealthService'}
Now with PowerShell V2, I modified the above codes -
$HealthService = Get-Service -Name "Healthservice" -ComputerName $Computername
It’s much cleaner and Admin friendly! ;)
PowerShell remoting is built on top of Windows Remote Management (WinRM), which is Microsoft’s implementation of WS-Management protocol, which also integrates with WMI. WinRM enables you to run WMI scripts against remote computers by using standard Internet protocols like HTTP and HTTPS, that means you can manage remote machines over the Internet.
In order to take full advantage of the V2 remoting feature, you do need to install PowerShell and WinRM on the target machines which I know it’s kind stretch in mostly Win2K3/XP Production Environment. But on Vista/Windows server 2008, they are features you could enable, with the upcoming release of Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2, they are on by default. So it’s about time to get your hands dirty with PowerShell V2/WinRM!