SCOM 2007 offers a customized poweshell console from where you can run all cmdlets related to SCOM. This powershell consoles comes along with SCOM management console installation. The only problem with this is it’s flakiness. I somehow don’t like this console and never felt like working on a powershell console. If you type “Get-” and press TAB, it should show all the cmdlets which starts with GET- but this console hangs and never gives me control back. There I realized the need for running these commands from normal powershell consoles so that everything works as expected and scripts also can make use of this environment. By default, if you launch a normal poweshell window from SCOM server where SCOM powershell console installed, you won’t get SCOM cmdlets by default. You need to load them explicitly.

So, in this post I will give you the list of steps required to load SCOM module into normal powershell window.

1. Go to Start->RUN-> type “powershell.exe”
2. In powershell window, type Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.EnterpriseManagement.OperationsManager.Client
3. Now connect to SCOM server by typing New-ManagementGroupConnection -ConnectionString:MYSCOMSRV1 where MYSCOMSRV1 is your SCOM RMS server.
4. Now let us set the path for SCOM by typing Set-Location ‘OperationsManagerMonitoring::’

This completes the import process of SCOM module into normal powershell windows and now you can use alll SCOM cmdlets from this console. Similarly if you have any scripts which uses powershell module, just  prefix your code with above steps so that SCOM module will get imported before the code in your scripts starts using any SCOM cmdlet.

I guess no need to say that you can import the SCOM module into normal powershell console only computer where SCOM management tools are installed.

Hope this halpe.. Happy learning..

Using powershell, we can query the status of a given windows cluster and instances inside it. With Windows 2008, MS is offering this ability. You need to import the failoverclusters  module to use the cmdlets available to manage windows cluster.

Import cluster module:

Import-module failoverclusters

Using this module you can do variety of things in cluster like adding and deleting disk, adding and deleting network interfaces, adding and deleting any other cluster resources, what not, you can do majority of operations with this powershell module.

Now I will give you a little example about how to connect to a cluster and get instances hosted on it.

Get-Cluster -Name cluster1.domain.com | Get-ClusterGroup

The above will connect to cluster1.domain.com and returns the status of groups/instances hosted on this cluster. You can also see preferred nodes, fail-over, fail-back settings for a given group, etc. I will try to post about them when I get a changes.

For your quick reference, I am posting the cluster cmdlets (source: technet)

Do you like one liners in powershell? Here is the quick and easy way to start, stop, restart a service on remote computer. This doesn’t require PowerShell remoting. That means you can use it against any computer which has windows operating system installed.

So far I have authored two articles on managing services using powershell:

1. Start/Stop/Restart service on remote computer with powershell
2. PowerShell: Start and stop services on remote computer with alternate credentials

The first one I wrote when I was not matured enough with PowerShell and the second one recently to address a specific requirement where user need to pass alternate credentials to manage services.

As most system administrators love to use poweshell one-liners which avoids any external script/module invocation, I want to share this little one which starts, stops, and restarts a service on remote computer.

Start a service on remote computer:

Start-Service -InputObject $(Get-Service -Computer COMPUTER1 -Name spooler)

Stop a service on remote computer:

Stop-Service -InputObject $(Get-Service -Computer COMPUTER1 -Name spooler)

Restart a service on remote computer:

Restart-Service -InputObject $(Get-Service -Computer COMPUTER1 -Name spooler)

Hope these little ones helps.

We want to assign output of a cmdlet/function to a variable so that we can use it in further processing. In scripts it is very inconvenient to debug a issue if the output is going to a variable and not to console. In such cases we can do nothing other than printing the variable value to the console by inserting extra lines of code.

To avoid such inconvenience, powershell has got a way to assign the output to a variable and print to console at the same time. This helped me in quick debugging of my scripts and oneliners.

Ok. Enough explaining about the usage and all and here is how it works.

($service = Get-Service -Name spooler)

Execute the command and you will understand what exactly it is doing. All we need to do it embed the whole command into into brackets like shown above.

Hope this little one helps you. Happy learning.

This is a tiny post and I am going to talk about DNS name resolution using using PowerShell. Using this you can resolve hostname to IP address and IP address to hostname. For demonstration purpose, I will use google.com for name resolution.

To resolve a DNS name to IP address:

[System.Net.DNS]::GetHostAddresses("google.com")

Similarly to resolve IP name to DNS name, try the below.

[System.Net.DNS]::GetHostByAddress("1.2.3.4")

This works for internal name resolutions as well. All you need to do is configure your internal DNS server IP address in the network connector properties.

Hope this helps.

We know how to import powershell module. It is just as simple as Import-Module <MODULENAME>, but how to know the functions available in that module? That is what I am going to talk about in this post.

Whenever we import a module, we like to see what all it offers. A module can offer variety of things. Out of them, functions and cmdlets are most basic things. I am not listing full differences between function and powershell here, but for sake of beginners, in a nut shell, you can view the code of functions but not of cmdlets. Coming to the original topic, let us see how we can get the functions and cmdlets inside a powershell module.

To view the offerings of a module, first we need to import it. you can use import-module cmdlet like I described above. Once it is imported, you can view what all it offers by using Get-Command cmdlet which comes by default with powershell. See below example for clarity.

Import-Module ActiveDirectory            
Get-Command -Module ActiveDirectory

In this example, I first imported activedirectory module and I am viewing the functions and cmdlets inside it by using Get-Command. By default Get-Command returns everything. If you want to filter-out the content to see only specific items like functions, then you can use -commandtype parameter.

Get-Command -Module ActiveDirectory -CommandType cmdlet

Hope this helps…

While having some discussion with my wife today, I came across an interesting scenario where “Active Directory Users and Computers” MMC is not showing the “Live Communications Server” tab in user properties though the LCS administrator tools are installed. I searched about same problem in internet and looks like many people have already experienced this. For some, enabling the “advanced features” option in dsa.msc MMC fixed the issue and some people installed the console on XP computers to work around the problem.

In the particular case where my wife did the troubleshooting, she found that LCS administrator tools are of 32-bit version and they were installed on a 64-bit OS server. So, what is the problem? 64-bit OS supports 32-bit right? what is the problem?.

The problem is that, when you launch dsa.msc MMC from run command, it will fire-up 64-bit version of MMC which looks like has some troubles in taking with 32-bit version of LCS tools. Hence, it is not loading the LCS related tabs in the properties of any user accounts.

To work around this problem, one can open dsa.msc in 32-bit mode by just simply typing the below command.

dsa.msc -32

You can use the similar trick to launch any MMC in 32-bit mode. After opening, just look the process name in task manager, you will find mmc.exe*32 which indicates a 32-bit process name. You will find normal mmc.exe if you run mmc without -32 switch.

I somehow felt this is interested topic every systemadmin should aware. Hence authored this post.

Hope this helps. Happy learning…

I received a comment yesterday on most popular post of my blog(https://techibee.com/powershell/startstoprestart-service-on-remote-computer-with-powershell/693) asking for a way to start, stop, restart services using alternate credentials. I thought about it for some time and came up with below script.

Note that I am not going to use built-in cmdlets like get-service, start-service, stop-service in here since they don’t have an option to provide alternate credentials. Instead I am replying on WMI class Win32_Process which allows me to pass the credentials when I use through Get-WMIObject cmdlet.

Here is the code.

$credential = Get-Credential
$myservice = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Service -ComputerName SERVER1 ` -Credential $credential -Filter "Name='spooler'"
$myservice.stopservice()

It is that simple. Similarly if you want to start the service just use “startservice” method like given below.

$credential = Get-Credential
$myservice = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Service -ComputerName SERVER1 `
-Credential $credential -Filter "Name='spooler'"
$myservice.startservice()

Hope this helps and this article also gains some popularity.

Often we see below message when we try connecting to a console of virtual machine using Virtual Center MMC.

“Number of Active Connections has changed. There are now X active connections to this console.”

All it indicates is someone else is also sharing the console. Most VMware admins found it frustrating because, it is diverting the attention and even if you close it, it will pop-up again. Looks like there is no option to disable this message. Read http://communities.vmware.com/thread/81825 if you need more details about the problem.

Since there is no way available around to disable that, can we have some workaround? One thing we can do is ask the persons who are currently connected to disconnect their sessions. But the question here is “how we know who all are connected”? There is no straight forward option in GUI to find out the users, but you can use VMware powershellCLI to get this information.

function Get-VMConsoleConnectedUser {            
param (            
$VmName,            
$VCName            
)            

Connetct-VIServer -Server $VCName            
$VMEntity = Get-VM $VMName            
Get-VIEvent -Start (Get-Date).addhours(-5) -Enity $VMEntity | ? `
{$_.FullFormattedMessage -like "Remote Console*"} | select Username,FullFormattedMessage, createdtime            

}

A few things you should keep in mind before using the above function:

• You should execute this from a powershell console where PowerCLI add-in is available
• This function is not having any error handling capabilities
• By default script looks for remote console logins in last 5 hours. Change the (get-date).addhours(-5) section if you would to change it.
• Always test it before you run in production

This is my first attempt to manage VMware Virtual center with powershell.

Hope this article helps.