Skip to main content

Powershell – The DSC book

Don Jones (@concentrateddon) is writing this awesome book about DSC. Please help him review the contents and make suggestions. You may leave feedback on the Powershell.org/FAQ web page (just create a new post there).
I have been working as an consultant in IT since 1999, I have done a lot of strange “things” (work related that is). I have done my fair share of vb-scripting and small GUIs or console application development using vb.net etc. I have even created an automation solution/"framework" with powershell and .net (.net Forms). I have been using powershell since exchange 2007, however the last 2 years I have been a “heavy” user writing advanced scripts/functions, dot-sourcing, creating small modules etc. Full disclosure; I am not exaggerating when I say I am super excited about DSC.

 My comments (in random order, when I say you/your I target Mr Jones, I think :-))
  • DSC resources – As you mention Microsoft has released 2 waves of additional resources for DSC. What are your thoughts about using these resources in production compared to creating your own custom DSC resources. They are marked x for experimental according to Microsoft…
  • Overall strategy/design of a DSC "solution" – I must admit I struggled with how you should create the configuration when you are limited to a single MOF-file. That is until I read a post about Composite resources in January I think. It is super important that people understand how they go about creating their DSC structure. Maybe you could include some general key "design-rules" for the DSC solution.
  • Credentials and security – Take the package resource (built-in). It is not perfectly clear that the credentials you supply is used for accessing the network location you have specified for the SourceFiles and not for the "installation" of the package (since you brought up the productID challenge).
  • Complicated application packages – How or can do you install those with DSC. Say you have an installer that is capable of setting up an application in an scaleout manner, that is you install the application and the database is hosted on another computer and the setup/installer does the initial configuration for the database. Could you use DSC for that? If so an example would be very cool and most helpful.
  • Show how to use multiple dependencies for DependsOn - DependsOn = @("[WindowsFeature]HyperV", "[File]VHDFolder")
  • Why DSC – The argument for DSC – More information and marketing (like this book) is needed to promote the new way of configuring your datacenter and infrastructure. Even with your rants – i like those by the way – there is still people that do not get the full picture of what is slowly happening. Automation is the future, however if you are scoping your book to a wide audience, perhaps you could include an executive summary for the none-technical readers that are wondering what the DSC-fuzz is all about.
  • Monitoring of DSC – Being a System Center guy with focus on SCOM, I would like to monitor DSC  with an ManagementPack (monitor both the PUSH/PULL infrastructure and the individual DSC target nodes testing for configuration drift). It maybe of topic for your book, however this may be where compliance comes into play somehow?
  • Azure/Windows Azure Pack – Wouldn’t it be a wonderful to have DSC resource for it?
  • ConfigMgr Desired State vs Powershell DSC – Why use Powershell DSC instead. I do not know if the desired state in ConfMgr is used by organizations,maybe they rely on GPO?
  • Group Policy vs Powershell DSC – Must also admit that I have a love2hate relationship with GPO. Why should enterprises start to replace GPO with DSC? What can you write to convince them that DSC is the bucket of gold they shall find at the end of the rainbow?
  • How to prevent overwriting of the current configuration for a node by accident or pure evil intent. Compliance I guess?
Please feel free to ignore the comments that does not suit your thoughts or the scope of your book. Keep up the good work, we are hungry for more.

 Cheers
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Serialize data with PowerShell

Currently I am working on a big new module. In this module, I need to persist data to disk and reprocess them at some point even if the module/PowerShell session was closed. I needed to serialize objects and save them to disk. It needed to be very efficient to be able to support a high volume of objects. Hence I decided to turn this serializer into a module called HashData. Other Serializing methods In PowerShell we have several possibilities to serialize objects. There are two cmdlets you can use which are built in: Export-CliXml ConvertTo-JSON Both are excellent options if you do not care about the size of the file. In my case I needed something lean and mean in terms of the size on disk for the serialized object. Lets do some tests to compare the different types: (Hashdata.Object.ps1) You might be curious why I do not use the Export-CliXML cmdlet and just use the [System.Management.Automation.PSSerializer]::Serialize static method. The static method will generate t
Post a Comment
Read more

Toying with audio in powershell

Controlling mute/unmute and the volume on you computer with powershell. Add-Type -TypeDefinition @' using System.Runtime.InteropServices; [Guid("5CDF2C82-841E-4546-9722-0CF74078229A"), InterfaceType(ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsIUnknown)] interface IAudioEndpointVolume { // f(), g(), ... are unused COM method slots. Define these if you care int f(); int g(); int h(); int i(); int SetMasterVolumeLevelScalar(float fLevel, System.Guid pguidEventContext); int j(); int GetMasterVolumeLevelScalar(out float pfLevel); int k(); int l(); int m(); int n(); int SetMute([MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Bool)] bool bMute, System.Guid pguidEventContext); int GetMute(out bool pbMute); } [Guid("D666063F-1587-4E43-81F1-B948E807363F"), InterfaceType(ComInterfaceType.InterfaceIsIUnknown)] interface IMMDevice { int Activate(ref System.Guid id, int clsCtx, int activationParams, out IAudioEndpointVolume aev); } [Guid("A95664D2-9614-4F35-A746-DE8DB63617E6"), Inte
3 comments
Read more

Creating Menus in Powershell

I have created another Powershell module. This time it is about Console Menus you can use to ease the usage for members of your oranization. It is available on GitHub and published to the PowershellGallery . It is called cliMenu. Puppies This is a Controller module. It uses Write-Host to create a Menu in the console. Some of you may recall that using Write-Host is bad practice. Controller scripts and modules are the exception to this rule. In addition with WMF5 Write-Host writes to the Information stream in Powershell, so it really does not matter anymore. Design goal I have seen to many crappy menus that is a mixture of controller script and business logic. It is in essence a wild west out there, hence my ultimate goal is to create something that makes it as easy as possible to create a menu and change the way it looks. Make it easy to build Menus and change them Make it as "declarative" as possible Menus The module supports multiple Men
Post a Comment
Read more