Book Image

Windows Server 2019 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Thomas Lee
Book Image

Windows Server 2019 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Thomas Lee

Overview of this book

Windows Server 2019 is the latest version of Microsoft’s flagship server operating system. It also comes with PowerShell Version 5.1 and offers a number of additional features that IT professionals will find useful. This book is designed to help you learn how to use PowerShell and manage the core roles, features, and services of Windows Server 2019. You will begin by creating a PowerShell Administrative Environment that features updated versions of PowerShell, the Windows Management Framework, .NET Framework, and third-party modules. Next, you will learn to use PowerShell to set up and configure Windows Server 2019 networking and understand how to manage objects in the Active Directory (AD) environment. The book will also guide you in setting up a host to utilize containers and deploying containers. Further along, you will be able to implement different mechanisms to achieve Desired State Configuration. The book will then get you up to speed with Azure infrastructure, in addition to helping you get to grips with setting up virtual machines (VMs), websites, and file share on Azure. In the concluding chapters, you will be able to deploy some powerful tools to diagnose and resolve issues with Windows Server 2019. By the end of this book, you will be equipped with a number of useful tips and tricks to automate your Windows environment with PowerShell.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Windows Server 2019 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook Third Edition
Foreword
Contributors
Preface
Index

Introduction


Desired State Configuration (DSC) is a management platform within Windows Server, and is implemented with Windows PowerShell. DSC enables you to define a computer's desired state declaratively and have PowerShell ensure that the computer is configured accordingly, and that it remains so. This is simpler than writing complex scripts to configure a particular computer.

With DSC, you define a configuration that describes the details of how a given node (computer) is to be configured. The configuration defines a series of resources to be invoked on the node and how these resources should be configured.

A DSC resource is a PowerShell module that is instructed to configure a given object residing on a node. If you are planning on using a specific DSC resource, you need the related PowerShell module on the computer on which you author the DSC configurations and on the target node.

As an example, you could define a node and specify that the WindowsFeature resource should be configured...