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What Version of Windows are on my Clients?

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It has been a very busy few months for me.  As you can see below, I’ve been spending a little time on board some Ships of the United States Navy.  Time to get back to work!!!


So, how do you know what version of PowerShell your clients are running.  There are a variety of ways of doing this.  We are going to use a CIM sessions to remotely pull this information from your client machines.  A few things need to be in place first.

  1. PowerShell Remoting needs to be turning on. (http://mctexpert.blogspot.com/2011/03/enable-powershell-v2-remote-management.html)
  2. Give your clients time to update their group policy.  This may take more than a day depending on how your network is laid out.
  3. Query the clients from Active Directory that you want to query.  Here is the link to the Remote Server Administrator Tools for Windows 10.  There are similar versions all the way back to Windows 7.  Install this on your client. (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=45520)
  4. Execute Get-CIMInstance.

We are focused on the fourth item.  In the past, I’ve advocated using Invoke-Command.  That still works but a CIMSession is a bit lighter weight.  Below is our code.

Get-ADComputer -Filter * |
    Select-Object -ExpandProperty Name |
    Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_OperatingSystem |
    ForEach-Object -Process {
        $Obj = New-Object -TypeName PSObject -Property @{
            Name = $_.PSComputerName
            OS = $Null
            Product = $Null
        }
        If ($_.ProductType -eq 1) {$Obj.Product = "Client"}
        ElseIf ($_.ProductType -eq 2) {$Obj.Product = "Domain Controller"}
        Else {$Obj.Product = "Server"}

        Switch -Wildcard ($_.Version)
        {
            "10.0*" {$Obj.OS = "Windows 10/2016"}
            "6.3*" {$Obj.OS = "Windows 8.1/2012 R2"}
            "6.2*" {$Obj.OS = "Windows 8/2012"}
            "6.1*" {$Obj.OS = "Windows 7/2008 R2"}
            "6.0*" {$Obj.OS = "Windows Vista/2008"}
        }
        Write-Output $Obj
    }
   
    

The first line uses Get-ADComputer to gather all computer objects in your domain.  Make sure you collect only the objects that you are interested in.

The Select-Object line provides us with just the name of the node.  This is important because of the next line which utilizes Get-CIMInstance.  If you look at the –CIMSession parameter for Get-CIMInstance, you will see that it accepts STRING ByValue.

PS C:\> Get-Help Get-CimInstance -Parameter CIMSession

-CimSession
    Specifies the CIM session to use for this cmdlet. Enter a variable that contains the CIM session or a command that creates or gets the CIM session, such as the New-CimSession or
    Get-CimSession cmdlets. For more information, see about_CimSessions.
   
    Required?                    true
    Position?                    named
    Default value               
    Accept pipeline input?       True (ByValue)
    Accept wildcard characters?  false

We are using the Win32_OperatingSystem class to gather our information.  Two properties from this class that we are interested in are Version and ProductType.  You can see the documentation for the Win32_OperatingSystem class here (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394239(v=vs.85).aspx).  We take the numeric values for these properties and translate them into something human readable.  This is done in a custom object which is then sent to the pipeline.
Name    OS              Product         
----    --              -------         
LON-DC1 Windows 10/2016 Domain Controller
LON-CL1 Windows 10/2016 Client    

One thing to note, this is not handling errors.  I have to leave some of the fun up to you.


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