I’ve been working on a little project of late that requires a Powershell script to check what roles a server has installed. Under 2008, this is fairly trivial as there is a ServerManager module for Powershell which can simply output which roles are installed. This is fine if you’re wanting to run the check locally, but what if you want to run it remotely? And if your local machine is not running 2008?
I tried to be sneaky and copy across the ServerManager module files but this didn’t work. I posted on the Microsoft powershell forums for help before I found the answer myself – use the invoke-command cmdlet. Below is an example of the code I used:
$strComputer = "someserver" # The server to run the command against
$strCommand = { import-module servermanager ; get-windowsfeature | Where {$_.installed -eq $true} | select displayname,name,installed,featuretype} # import the module, run the command to get the features that are installed
$FeatureList = invoke-command -computername $strComputer -scriptblock $strCommand # invoke-command against our remote server and run command we constructed
$FeatureList can then be manipulated as you see fit. This sort of thing could probably be used for a range of tasks.