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

Creating an update report


Windows update server contains multiple built-in reports that provide administrators with many of the details needed to perform their jobs. However, rare cases do exist where the built-in reports don't fit your specific needs and a custom report must be created.

One example of needing a custom report is searching for systems missing a certain update. This report could then be automatically processed by a script that would initiate installation of the updates on the clients. Using PowerShell, this process can be done in a single step.

In this recipe, we will be directly querying the WSUS database on the update server by using PowerShell. We will be using a SQL query to generate our custom report and then returning the information back to PowerShell as DataSet.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we will be working with a WSUS server with one or more clients. Specifically, we will be querying the Windows Internal Database which is used by the default installation of WSUS.

How...