virtual techdays INDIA │ 9-11 February 2011 Monitoring and managing remote Windows 7 desktops with Windows PowerShell Ravikanth C │ Dell Inc.

About Me Work at Dell Inc. Windows PowerShell MVP Author of: Free eBook: Layman’s guide to PowerShell 2.0 remoting Free eBook: WMI Query Language via PowerShell Cheat Sheet: SharePoint 2010 PowerShell cmdlets Blog at:

Session Outline Objectives What is PowerShell? Cmdlets to manage remote systems PowerShell remoting for remote system management PowerShell for WMI event monitoring Software & hardware inventory Takeaways Learn how to use PowerShell cmdlets to manage remote systems Learn how to use PowerShell remoting Learn how to monitor remote systems using WMI

What is PowerShell? Object-based Shell Interactive commands Scripting language Automate everything Sharable and reusable Comes built-in on Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008 R2 Download available for Windows XP, Windows 2003, and Windows Vista

Cmdlets to manage remote systems 35 cmdlets with –ComputerName parameter Get-Command -type cmdlet | Where { $_.Definition -like "*-ComputerName*" }

Working with performance data One cmdlet Get-Counter Gets live, real-time performance counter data Sample interval and Maximum samples can be altered Run as administrator to be able to read all counters

virtual techdays INDIA │ 9-11 February 2011 DEMO: Working with Performance Data

Working with processes Five cmdlets Get-Process Debug-Process Start-Process Stop-Process Wait-Process Start-Process and Stop-Process have no –ComputerName Parameter

virtual techdays INDIA │ 9-11 February 2011 DEMO: Working with processes

PowerShell remoting Not all remoting is the same Get-Process, Get-Service, and others use.NET Framework methods Not all cmdlets have –ComputerName parameter Remoting requirements: Windows PowerShell 2.0 Microsoft.NET Framework 2.0 or later Windows Remote Management 2.0 To configure PowerShell remoting: start PowerShell as admin Use Enable-PSRemoting

Remoting Methods Supports both fan-in and fan-out remoting Invoke-Command Can be used for both 1-1 and 1-many remoting Interactive remoting Similar to a telnet session Enter-PSSession Implicit remoting Import a remote session into local session Import-PSSession

virtual techdays INDIA │ 9-11 February 2011 DEMO: PowerShell remoting

WMI Event monitoring Events generated by operating system and several other components Use Register-WMIEvent cmdlet Create temporary consumer to trigger an action based on an event Requires knowledge of WMI Query Language Unregister-Event to delete the consumer

virtual techdays INDIA │ 9-11 February 2011 DEMO: WMI Event monitoring

Software Inventory Use Get-WMIObject cmdlet For remote systems use –ComputerName parameter Query Win32_Product WMI class For software installed via MSI Install & Uninstall software remotely Query Windows registry for a list of all other software

virtual techdays INDIA │ 9-11 February 2011 DEMO: Software Inventory

virtual techdays INDIA │ 9-11 February 2011 RESOURCES  PowerShell remoting ebooks  Layman’s guide to PowerShell remoting:  Administrator’s guide to PowerShell remoting:  WMI Query Language   Getting started with PowerShell 

virtual techdays THANKS │ 9-11 February 2011 (Twitter)