Enabling PowerShell Remoting and Remote Administration - Windows 2008 R2 Server Core

Enabling Powershell Remoting and Remote Administration - Windows 2008 R2 Server Core

Following on from my post Enable WinRM via Group Policy, there as some follow on tasks to ensure server core is manageable via powershell and server manager.

Add Firewall Rule
To start with, to allow GUI remote management of the event viewer, another firewall rule needs to be added :

Computer Configuration / Policies / Windows Settings / Security Settings / Windows Firewall with Advanced Security

Create an Inbound Rule allowing the predefined group 'Remote Event Log Management'

Install powershell and packs
Next, as server core is the only version of Windows Server 2008 R2 that does not install Powershell V2 by default, we need to install powershell and which ever cmdlet management pack we need. In this case I am only going to install the server manager and AD cmdlets.

Winrs -r:$dc.name Ocsetup MicrosoftWindowsPowerShell
Winrs -r:$dc.name Ocsetup ServerManager-PSH-Cmdlets
Winrs -r:$dc.name Ocsetup ActiveDirectory-PowerShell

Restart services
To complete the task, we need to stop and start the WinRM service to register the services now available. As we will be stopping the Winrm Service, we can use it to stop the service, but not to start it again. To get around this, I have used WMI to connect to the remote server.

$service = gwmi -Class Win32_Service -ComputerName $DC.name | where {$_.name -eq "winrm"}
stop service"
$service.StopService()
#let the service stop before trying to start in again
Start-sleep 2
"start service"
$service.StartService()

Finally, I have read in from a csv list of servers to process. Actually I ran a remote job with the script from this post and output the servers that failed and exported to csv:

$job.childjobs | where {$_.State -eq "Failed"} | Select location | Export-Csv dclist.csv -NoTypeInformation

The complete script

Foreach ($DC in $(Import-csv dclist.csv)){
   Winrs -r:$dc.location Ocsetup MicrosoftWindowsPowerShell
   Winrs -r:$dc.location Ocsetup ServerManager-PSH-Cmdlets
   Winrs -r:$dc.location Ocsetup ActiveDirectory-PowerShell
   $service = gwmi -Class Win32_Service -ComputerName $DC.location | where {$_.name -eq "winrm"}
   "stop service"
   $service.StopService()
   #let the service stop before trying to start in again
   Start-sleep 2
   "start service"
   $return = $service.StartService()
   #check the service has started, if not try again
   if ($return.returnvalue -ne 0){$service.StartService()}
}

After setting the GPO to enable winrm, adding the firewall rules to manage event logs remotely, ensuring the PowerShell componenets are installed and the service have been restarted, your server core installs should be easily managed remotely.