Add Windows Features to Remote Servers

This morning I had a question come in on LinkedIn about installing the SNMP service on 20 remote servers. The first person who responded recommended using Enable-PSRemoting on all servers and the downloading some tools from Sysinternals. He was on the right track. The problem is that process would require either traveling to the remote sites or providing admin credentials to local users to do it for him. Also, the full power of PowerShell remoting is not utilized since the instructions were to utilized other software.

A simpler solution would be to enable PowerShell Remoting via Group Policy :(http://mctexpert.blogspot.com/2011/03/enable-powershell-v2-remote-management.html).

Next, you need to create a session to your remote servers.

$Session = New-PSSession –ComputerName SVR1, SVR2, SVR3

Using the Invoke-Command cmdlet, you can execute commands on the remote machines. You first need to import ServerManager on the remote machines (Unless your remote servers run PowerShell V3) and then add the feature. This importing of ServerManager is actually being done on the remote servers. Look carefully, that is a semi colon “;” after ServerManager.

Invoke-Command –Scriptblock {Import-Module ServerManager; Add-WindowsFeature “SNMP-Services” –IncludeAllSubFeatures} –Session $Session

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Jason Yoder, MCT

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