Managing Windows Servers Remotely with PowerShell
Automation in Windows has historically been a challenge due to lack of built in tools for remote management. In the past few years, the enhancements to PowerShell and WinRM (Windows Remote Management) have forged a path that is now more on par with other operating systems in regards to remote access.
One of the primary benefits of using PowerShell is that there is no need to install a third-party agent. WinRM is configured by most Cloud Providers, and Rackspace enables an HTTPS listener during provisioning.
What you need
PoshStack is an excellent set of PowerShell tools that enables us to automate gathering the information we need to connect to our servers. Built on OpenStack .NET SDK, we can leverage these functions in PowerShell for many other management tasks as well.
Example listing servers by name match
Get-OpenStackComputeServer -Account ORD | Where-Object {$_.name -like 'ServerName*'}
Challenges in authentication
Microsoft usually assumes you are in an Active Directory Domain utilizing credentials that can access all servers in your environment. This may be true in certain cases however, when utilizing the cloud, it is not a certainty. In this example, I use a set of credentials that works across all of my devices to keep the scope of this article simple.
$UserCred = Get-Credential -Credential AdminAccount
Putting it all together to connect
$Servers = Get-OpenStackComputeServer -Account ORD | Where-Object {$_.name -like 'ServerName*'}
foreach ($Server in $Servers)
{
$so = New-PSSessionOption -SkipCNCheck -SkipCACheck -ProxyAccessType IEConfig
New-PSSession -ComputerName $Server.AccessIPv4 -Credential $UserCred -UseSSL -SessionOption $so
}
The following code gathers all the connected sessions:
$ConnectedServers = Get-PSSession
Send a command to all the servers at once with the following code:
Invoke-Command -Session $ConnectedServers -ScriptBlock {Get-Service RackspaceCloudServersAgent}
This is just a quick primer on how to use PowerShell and remote sessions. WinRM is the foundation for automation in Windows for DSC(Desired State Configuration) or Ansible among others.
Look for future articles describing how to leverage these concepts further using DSC.
Example
Further reading
DSC - Desired State Configuration
