Book Image

Windows Server 2012 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook

By : EDRICK GOAD
Book Image

Windows Server 2012 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook

By: EDRICK GOAD

Overview of this book

Automating server tasks allows administrators to repeatedly perform the same, or similar, tasks over and over again. With PowerShell scripts, you can automate server tasks and reduce manual input, allowing you to focus on more important tasks. Windows Server 2012 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook will show several ways for a Windows administrator to automate and streamline his/her job. Learn how to automate server tasks to ease your day-to-day operations, generate performance and configuration reports, and troubleshoot and resolve critical problems. Windows Server 2012 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook will introduce you to the advantages of using Windows Server 2012 and PowerShell. Each recipe is a building block that can easily be combined to provide larger and more useful scripts to automate your systems. The recipes are packed with examples and real world experience to make the job of managing and administrating Windows servers easier. The book begins with automation of common Windows Networking components such as AD, DHCP, DNS, and PKI, managing Hyper-V, and backing up the server environment. By the end of the book you will be able to use PowerShell scripts to automate tasks such as performance monitoring, reporting, analyzing the environment to match best practices, and troubleshooting.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Windows Server 2012 Automation with PowerShell Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Inventorying hardware with PowerShell


Often times, a system administrator needs to identify what hardware is installed in their environment. This could be for an asset tracking project, finding available resources, or even identifying older equipment that needs to be retired. Most hardware information on a system is stored in WMI and can be accessed via in-built PowerShell functions or via WMI queries.

In this recipe, we will review the various methods for gathering inventory information from our local system. In addition to collecting from the local system, these methods can be expanded to include remote systems.

How to do it...

We can review the various methods for gathering inventory information as follows:

  1. Gather disk information from the local system.

    $TargetSystem="."
    $myCim = New-CimSession -ComputerName $TargetSystem 
    Get-Disk -CimSession $myCim 

    When executed, the results will be displayed similar to the following screenshot:

  2. Review the contents of the Get-Disk function.

    Get-Content Function...