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Easily open a Remote PowerShell Session on Server 2012

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The GUI is good,but PowerShell is better.  Many IT Pros in my classes are confused with why we are moving more and more to a text based administration.  All I can say is “everything old is new again.” 

Remember back in the day when we had the expensive main frame that was larger than most peoples living rooms?  End users accessed it via terminals.  We moved on to the Client/Server model when hardware began to shrink and became cheaper.   Now we are moving to virtualized desktops and are accessing them from terminals.  Well, the same thing is happening on the administrative side. 

We used to do everything in a text when it came to network administration.  With Windows NT 3.5, we started doing it graphically.  This made management very intuitive. There are some limitations though.  If I needed to find all user SIDs that ended in 4 and were both part of the Newark OU and also in both the Finance and HR security groups.  If I find them, I need to change their address and add them to another group and do this search and change every week, well the GUI cannot do that.  So, we need to know PowerShell to handle things like this.

Server 2012 is designed to allow you to manage multiple servers from one.  Let’s say that I need to open a remote PowerShell session on another server.  This is one way to do it:

  • Open PowerShell
  • Type Enter-PSSession –ComputerName Indy-SVR1

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Noticed the command prompt has changed to let me know that I am not executing commands on Indy-SVR1.

Now try this.

  • Open Server Manager.
  • Right click the server that you want to open the remote PowerShell session on.

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  • Click Windows PowerShell.

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Take a look at the command prompt.  You are remotely administering the remote server via PowerShell.  if you selected multiple server in Server Manager and then did this procedure, you would open a remote PowerShell session on each one in a separate Shell.

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