Book Image

Getting Started with Powershell

Book Image

Getting Started with Powershell

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Getting Started with PowerShell
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Next Steps
Index

What is WMI?


Getting objects from cmdlets is what PowerShell is all about. Unfortunately, there are more kinds of objects that we might be interested in than PowerShell has cmdlets for. This was definitely the case during the time of PowerShell 1.0, which only had less than a hundred cmdlets. What do we do about the objects for which PowerShell doesn't have an explicit cmdlet? The answer involves Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). WMI was introduced as a common interface to manage operating system objects all the way back in Windows NT. WMI provides a uniform way to retrieve objects, which allows us to inspect and even change the state of components, processes, and other objects. Before we look at specific WMI information, it's important to understand how objects are stored in WMI.

WMI organization

The WMI objects are stored in a repository that is local to a computer system. The repository is divided into several namespaces, each of which provides different objects. Inside a namespace...