Chapter 18. Desired State Configuration

This chapter covers

  • The need for Desired State Configuration (DSC)
  • Configuration management theory
  • DSC architecture
  • DSC modes: push and pull
  • Local configuration manager
  • Partial configurations

Make it so!

Captain Jean-Luc Picard, USS Enterprise-D

The need to build and configure servers quickly in a consistent, repeatable manner has been a longstanding problem in IT. One solution is to adopt Desired State Configuration (DSC), a PowerShell extension introduced with Windows Server 2012 R2 (PowerShell v4) and extended in Windows Server 2016 (PowerShell v5). DSC provides a mechanism to manage the configuration of your server estate, including:

  • Add or remove Windows features
  • Manage registry, files, ...

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