POWERSHELL AND WMI

Discovering your environment – in a meaningful way

Kevin Sullivan – Specops Software

Darren Mar-Elia –SDM Software

Welcome

• Kevin Sullivan

– kevin.Sullivan@specopssoft.com

– @kevsully67

• Director of Sales Engineering

• Recovering GP MVP, Musician

• Previously Principal Program Manager at Microsoft

• Technology lover – geek dad

WHOAMI

Darren Mar-Elia

• 30 years of experience in enterprise IT and software

• Founder, in 2006, of Group Policy solutions company SDM Software, Inc. (www.sdmsoftware.com)– Wrote the first PowerShell cmdlets for Group Policy!

• Microsoft Group Policy MVP for the last 11 years

• Contributing Editor to Windows IT Pro Magazine since 1997

• Founder of GPOGUY.COM—a Group Policy resource site

3

SDM Software

• Founded in 2006, by Darren Mar-Elia—Group Policy MVP with 30 years experience in IT & Enterprise Software

• Provides Group Policy Reporting, Auditing and Compliance solutions to over 300 customers worldwide

• Freeware tools for Group Policy management to 1000s of users

• WWW.GPOGUY.COM resource site for GP technical questions (GPTalk Forum)

WWW.SDMSOFTWARE.COM

Stream of Consciousness

LET IT FLOW

What is Windows Management

Instrumentation (WMI)?

• Based on the DMTF Common Information Model (CIM) standard

– Industry-standard for describing systems and their components

• WMI is the CIM implementation for Windows

• But, lots of CIM implementations on other platforms

– Linux, network devices, etc.

• See Open Management Instrumentation (OMI)—Microsoft’s open source CIM framework

What is WMI For?

• Provides a standard mechanism for describing Windows system configuration

– And allow some manipulation of it

• Provides the basis for Desired State Configuration (DSC) in PowerShell v4+

• Accessible remotely via DCOM (old way) or WinRM(WS-Management implementation)

How WMI Works

• Creates a hierarchy of System Configuration “stuff”

– Namespaces

• Classes

– Properties

– Methods

• Configuration elements are instances of classes

– e.g. the “Spooler” service is an instance of the Win32_Service class

– Instances have properties (e.g. State property equals ‘Running’) and Methods (Stop() method to stop the service)

• You can query instances using WMI Query Language (WQL)

– Select * from Win32_Service Where Name = ‘spooler’

PowerShell & WMI

• Microsoft started by providing a single cmdlet to get access to WMI instances on local or remote systems:

– Get-WMIObject

• In PowerShell v4, introduced the “CIM Cmdlets”

– Think a more raw (and flexible) way of getting to WMI data (e.g.)

– Get-CIMInstance

– Invoke-CIMMethod

FORMATTING OUTPUT

Exploring Objects

• Get-Member

– MemberType

– Properties

– Methods

WHAT IS IN THE OBJECT

Format Right

• Guidance received from the experts

– Don Jones & Jeffrey Hicks

– PowerShell in a Month Of Lunches

• Get this book

• And PS Toolmaking in a Month of Lunches

• Figure out everything first

– What data/objects do you want to retrieve

– Sort/organize/filter/query etc…

– Perfume the Pig! (Format)

THE SUPER BASIC

Select-Object / Where-Object

• Cmdlets return object(s)

– Could be many

• Need to filter down to something manageable or useable

• Need to Organize output to make results easier to parse

Format-Table

• FT– Don’t use alias’ if you are sharing!

• Default Views– Dir $pshome

– Look for ps1xml files

– Define default output for cmdlets

• Creating Custom views– Out-of-Scope (but pretty cool)

– http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg580944(v=vs.85).aspx

Format-List

• FL

– Don’t use Alias’ if you are sharing!

• If the default output of an object is more than six columns it will default to a list

• Properties shown in a stack

• Great for looking at details as you figure out what to do

Format-Wide

• Quick results

• Easy to read on the screen

• Great when digging in deeper… Progressive exploration

Out-GridView

• As we say in Boston

– Wicked Pissah!

• Sort

• Manipulate

• Quick

• Export-CSV open in Excel

– Better, but more steps and not as quick

– For saving and sharing long term… Export and Excel is way better

Default Formats

• $pshome

– Ps1xml files – defining default output

– Open in notepad to explore contents –BE CAREFUL

• Object types

• Get-EventLog –LogName Applcation | Get-Member

Wrap-up

• Questions

• Next month?

• Send feedback

• kevin.sullivan@specopssoft.com

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE BRING?

Resources• Http://www.SpecopsSoft.com

• Http://success.SpecopsSoft.com

• Http://sdmsoftware.com

LOTS OF RESOURCES

Resources• http://www.powershellpro.com

– Some great tutorials

• http://powershell.org

• http://technet.Microsoft.com/scriptcenter

– Repository!

• http://jdhitsolutions.com/blog

– Jeff Hicks

• PowerShell help system!

• http://www.specopssoft.com

• http://success.specopssoft.com

LOTS OF RESOURCES