When you are developing your scripts, you may run into situations where you need to configure remote systems. While a lot of command-line programs provide the ability to execute remote commands, PowerShell provides Common Information Model (CIM) cmdlets allowing the scripts to be executed on remote systems over a session. The CIM cmdlet brokers the communications which provides improved performance and reliability while executing a group of commands on multiple remote systems.

Microsoft's implementation of the CIM cmdlets was derived from the need to communicate with both Windows and non Windows systems from a singular command base. Microsoft initially created Web Services for Management (WS-Man), which allows communications to non Windows systems. This was problematic due to the protocol being SOAP-based and made it difficult to quickly create PowerShell scripts to communicate with these systems.

With the release of PowerShell 2.0, Microsoft developed...