Just a quick Nano server tip for this morning. As of Windows Server 2016 TP4, Nano Server only contains the CIM cmdlets. It does not contain the WMI cmdlets:
This is a good thing as it means that we can still perform some tasks that are not covered by the PowerShell modules that are provided with Nano Server.
Several months back I created a DSC Resource for configuring iSCSI Server Targets (including Virtual Disks) as well as iSCSI Initiators using Desired State Configuration (DSC). I created this for several reasons:
I needed a way for LabBuilder to automatically build Scale-Out File Servers (with CSVs). I needed something to use as an example in my Creating Professional DSC Resources series. No one else had already created one. This weekend I decided to add iSNS Server support to the resource - for both the ciSCSIServerTarget and ciSCSIInitiator resources.
This will just be a very quick post today.
Configuring an iSCSI Initiator to use an iSNS Server is fairly easy using the iSCSI configuration utility:
But lets face it, that’s no fun and it really doesn’t fit well when when we have to configure 10’s or 100’s of initiators or we’re using Server Core. Not to mention that this is something we’d really want to do with Desired State Configuration.
Introduction You might have noticed that instances of certain types of classes are created, a method called Clone is available that will create a (shallow) copy of the object. A PowerShell Hashtable object is a classic example of a class that supports the Clone method:
This is nothing new to developers, but for most Ops people it might be something they’re not that familiar with. But if you are an Ops person who is implementing more advanced PowerShell modules or scripts in WMF 5.
This interesting article gives some background details on some of the problems I ran into after upgrading my DSC dev machine to WMF 5.0 10586. This is because in WMF5.0 the DSC credential encryption mechanism was converted to use Protect/Unprotect-CMSMessage. It clears up a lot of things for me and is a worthwhile read if you’re using DSC credential encryption on WMF5.0.
