Windows PowerShell 3.0 First Steps

Chapter 8. Using WMI

• Understanding the WMI Model

• Working with objects and namespaces

• Querying WMI: The basics

The inclusion of Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) in virtually every operating system released by Microsoft since Windows NT 4.0 should give you an idea of the importance of this underlying technology. From a network management perspective, many useful tasks can be accomplished using just Windows PowerShell, but to truly begin to unleash the power of scripting, you need to bring in additional tools. This is where WMI comes into play. WMI provides access to many powerful ways of managing Microsoft Windows systems. In this section, we dive into the pieces that make up WMI. We look at several concepts, such as namespaces, providers, ...