Not sure how to phrase this

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Ok, bear with me on this as I have no idea how to phrase it.

As I have been trying, when I can, to get into powershell, i find myself getting confused with wmi, wmic , cim etc, even though I know they sort of sit close together in the world of microsoft. Stuff like .net framework and where would Activve directory sit in all of this. I am not sure if I am makiing sense but thought I would ask

If anyone has a link or a pic/diagram of where things sit and relate to each other, that would be much appreciated

Ed

 

Well to be fair to myself, i can do the basics to an extent. I think one thing that really messes me up is other peoples scripting.

I wanted to rename a load of PCs but didnt want to go round manually and do this, so found a script and worked out how to change what I needed to do. But that was for one PC per time, which was still faster. However I needed to do about 50, where I had to liaise with another guy fom another dept, his script was absolutley massive, like way over the top, which never really helped me whatsoever.

Cheers for the links though, JK I will look at them and see what I can do.

I think its fair to say i made one hell of a great decision to get into IT, its not the same old same old every day, it can vary, doing things like this makes it very exciting and interesting, IMO.

My only problem is, I want to do everything ha ha

Ed

 

I think it's worth noting some of the structure here to better grasp what's going on under the hood

PowerShell is the Microsoft scripting interface, it's both a language, and a shell, and it's built on top of .NET
included out of the box with PowerShell are cmdlets that allow you to interface with CIM and WMI
CIM and WMI for all intent and purpose are the same (but not actually the same, bear with me)
CIM is an open standard that provides a known management interface for systems, switches, storage devices etc
WMI is built on top of CIM, it was Microsofts management interface of choice for years and it's still heavily used

Pretty much all windows systems can be communicated with via WMI or CIM, and most of the newer ones have at least one version of .NET installed

Now, knowing this we can see that PowerShell can be used in multiple ways
it can manually talk to individual systems via CIM or WMI if they are properly exposed and configured
it can be used to craft tools that can reach out to multiple systems at a time via CIM or WMI
it can be used in other manners that .NET may expose/enable

Active Directory has it's own PowerShell module that's installed as part of RSAT, so once you have that you can do all sorts of things in the directory directly via PowerShell cmdlet
things like adding/removing users, resetting passwords etc

These cmdlets are provided by a PowerShell module, and I believe that specific one is built on native C# code (Modules can be PowerShell or C#)

Modules expand PowerShells usefulness above all of its 'out of the box' power by providing ready made cmdlets that interface with various other techs (like Active Directory, or Azure, or AWS etc)