Thomas Lee - Windows Server Automation with PowerShell Cookbook: Powerful ways to automate and manage Windows administrative tasks, 4th Edition

Windows Server Automation with PowerShell Cookbook

Fourth Edition

Powerful ways to automate and manage Windows administrative tasks

Thomas Lee

BIRMINGHAMMUMBAI

Windows Server Automation with PowerShell Cookbook

Fourth Edition

Copyright 2021 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing or its dealers and distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

Producer: Caitlin Meadows

Acquisition Editor Peer Reviews: Divya Mudaliar

Project Editor: Parvathy Nair

Content Development Editor: Lucy Wan

Copy Editor: Safis Editor

Technical Editor: Aditya Sawant

Proofreader: Safis Editor

Indexer: Rekha Nair

Presentation Designer: Ganesh Bhadwalkar

First published: March 2013

Second edition: September 2017

Third edition: February 2019

Fourth edition: July 2021

Production reference: 1290721

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-80056-845-7

www.packt.com

I was excited when Thomas Lee told me he was writing a new book.

I was even more excited when he told me that it was about Windows Server 2022.

I was even more excited when he told me that it was using PowerShell 7.

Thomas Lee has been a fixture of the PowerShell community starting from the moment he disrupted my first presentation about it, shouting wildly: "Take my money! I'll buy it now!". He has watched and participated in every step of the PowerShell journey and has been an effective and articulate advocate for the user community. Thomas effectively communicates the needs of the community to Windows Server and PowerShell teams. Thomas also effectively communicates the new advances of Windows Server and PowerShell to the community. He lets them know both what is possible and how to achieve it.

As part of his community advocacy, Thomas was forthright about the challenges that Windows administrators were having with PowerShell Core. PowerShell Core was a departure from Windows PowerShell. It moved from .NET Framework to .NET Core. The core benefit of .NET Core was that it was cross-platform it ran on Linux and it was open source. The core issue with .NET Core was that it did not have all the features of .NET Framework. As such, PowerShell Core did not have all the features of Windows PowerShell. Because it did not have all the features, several partner teams did not support it.

You know how some teenagers experience a growth spurt and have an awkward period? Core PowerShell was our awkward period. The ability to run anywhere was awesome, there were a bunch of new features, it was much faster, but the lack of critical mass support meant that it wasn't for everyone and every scenario.

At the end of the day, no one cares about how you make the sausage they just care about how it tastes. At some point, someone will tell the Herculean story of what was involved in migrating to .NET Core. It was massive and required a complete overhaul of our engineering and test systems. But that overhaul delivered us the gift of agility. And with that agility came increased customer focus and responsiveness. And because PowerShell was open source, the community was able to adapt the product to their needs and go even faster. I remember a video of Jeff Woolsey demonstrating a new capability and Thomas Lee tweeting out: "This is awesome. It kind of feels like PowerShell V1 all over again. SUPER excited." I responded, saying: "Yes, but with much better velocity."

The virtuous cycle of agility, customer focus, and velocity allowed us to make rapid progress and close the gap in features with Windows PowerShell so that by the time we shipped V7, we decided to change the name to just "PowerShell". No qualifiers. No caveats. Just PowerShell.

Now to be completely forthright, there are still some things that Windows PowerShell does that PowerShell V7 does not. Based upon low usage and community feedback, we dropped a set of features like Workflow. I was confident that these would not get in the way of managing Windows Server, but I always knew that Thomas Lee would be a reality check on that.

Given that Thomas uses PowerShell V7 as the basis for this book on managing Windows Server, I can rest easy.

Before I go, let me reiterate PowerShell's focus on making customers successful. We recently got feedback that we had become a bottleneck and were slowing down community contributions to the code base. We modified our governance, restructured the code with new projects to allow more parallel development, and added more people from the community to the process. We anticipate that that will further accelerate the agility, customer focus, and velocity cycle.

PowerShell is all about making you successful.

Have fun scripting!

Jeffrey Snover

Microsoft Technical Fellow

June 2021

Thomas Lee is a consultant/trainer/writer from England and has been in the IT business since the late 1960s. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University, Thomas joined ComShare, where he was a systems programmer building the Commander II time-sharing operating system, a forerunner of today's cloud computing paradigm. In the mid-1970s, he moved to ICL to work on the VME/K operating system. After a sabbatical in 1980/81, he joined what is today known as Accenture, leaving in 1988 to run his own consulting and training business, which is still active today.

Thomas holds numerous Microsoft certifications, including MCSE (one of the first in the world) and later versions, MCT (25 years), and was awarded Microsoft's MVP award 17 times. He lives today in a cottage in the English countryside with his family, a nice wine cellar, and a huge collection of live recordings by The Grateful Dead and The Jerry Garcia band.

I'd first like to thank Jeffrey Snover of Microsoft for the invention of PowerShell. I was lucky enough to be in the room the very first time he presented what was then called Monad. His enthusiasm was infectious, and nearly 20 years later I am still excited. And, of course, no book on PowerShell would be complete without acknowledging the great work done by the PowerShell team, including Joey Aiello, Steve Lee, Jim Truher, and many more. The team has consistently listened to the community, found ways to make PowerShell better, and has delivered release after release of solid, well written code. When you write a book, there is a large publishing team behind you without whom this book would just be a dream. This is even more relevant as this book was written during the Covid19 pandemic. Coping with the results of that has been a real challenge for all of us. A huge thank you has to go to the Packt team: Caitlin Meadows (a truly outstanding editor) and all the folks she brought to the party. Thanks too to Parvathy Nair and Lucy Wan, two dedicated editors who turned my badly written gibberish into decent technical English, and to Aditya Sawant, who helped with proofs.