Configuring Windows Server 2012 Core: PowerShell

As mentioned in my previous post about configuring Windows Server 2012 Core, you have multiple options. One is sconfig, but the preferred method is using PowerShell. PowerShell is a really powerful scripting language and Microsoft is pushing the use in all of their products.

In this post, I will describe how to configure your Windows Server 2012 Core installation using PowerShell. I will describe how to change your computername, set the IP address and join your server to the domain.

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Configuring Windows Server 2012 Core: SConfig

With the release of Windows 2008, Microsoft introduced the Core installation. This is a stripped down version of the Windows Operating System, without any GUI (less space, smaller attack surface). Microsoft continues this option with Server 2012 and recommends to install the core version. When you install Windows Server 2012, the core installation is even selected by default. Configuring Windows Server 2012 Core is a bit harder without the GUI, so I’m writing two articles about configuring Windows Server 2012 Core.

For the configuration, you have two options: using SConfig or using PowerShell. Microsoft is pushing the use of PowerShell harder and harder, so PowerShell would be the preferred way to configure Windows Server 2012. I will get to PowerShell in the next article, in this article I will focus on using SConfig.

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Monitoring XenApp with WMI – Part 2: Citrix Servers

In part 1 of this series I talked about the basics of the Citrix WMI providers. In this part, I will talk about getting all information about a XenApp server, like which farm it belongs to, what applications are published, etc.

Again, I will be using PowerShell to get the WMI classes. I will assume that you are logged in to the XenApp server to do the WMI calls. But all of these calls can be done from another server (as long as you have the correct permissions and WMI isn’t blocked by a firewall). See part 1 to get more information about remote WMI calls.

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