PowerShell 4.0 Maintains Configurations

The latest release of PowerShell (version 4.0), integrated into Windows Server 2012 R2 and 64-bit versions of Windows 8.1, is an important tool for managing Windows servers and desktops, including most of Microsoft’s servers and hosted services and some third-party applications. The primary new feature of PowerShell is the template-driven declarative management of system configurations and settings, which is intended to reliably apply configuration settings across one or more systems. Benefiting from the new feature may require an investment of time and changes to existing processes.

Desired State Configuration

Deploying servers for a new application, building out a redundant set of servers to provide high availability, recovering systems after a failure, and configuring Windows systems, services, and applications have traditionally required a largely manual installation and configuration process. Even when the components are installed, orchestrating configuration settings across two or more systems designed to work together and ensuring they stayed synchronized requires diligence and, often, custom processes. In general, the lack of a single template-driven configuration technology has led to unpredictability when deploying systems, especially at volume, and has made it difficult to ensure that initial settings are maintained over time and reliably updated when a system is patched or modified.