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Steven Murawski

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Steven Murawski

12 articles published

• 5 min read

Going Deeper on DSC Resources

Desired State Configuration is a very new technology and declarative configuration management is a very young space yet.  We (Microsoft and the community) are still figuring out the best structure for resources, composite configurations, and other structures.
That said, there are certain viewpoints that I’ve come to, either from hands on experience or in watching how other communities (like the Puppet community or Chef community) handle similar problems.

How Granular Should I Get?

There is no absolute answer.

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Tips and Tricks
• 3 min read

Building Desired State Configuration Custom Resources

Now that we’ve suitably rested, let’s get back to working with Desired State Configuration.  Now, there are some basic features to work with that ship by default and the PowerShell team has been blogging some additional resources, but in order to do some really interesting thing with DSC, we’ll need to create our own resources.

The High Points

The DSC Resource Structure

DSC resources are (at their most basic) a PowerShell module.  These modules are augmented by a schema.mof file (we’ll get into that more in a minute or two).  These modules expose three main functions, Get-TargetResource, Set-TargetResource, and Test-TargetResource.  All three functions should share the same set of parameters.

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PowerShell for Admins Tutorials
• 5 min read

Configuring a Desired State Configuration Client

Once we have our pull server in place and we’re starting to create configurations, we need to set up our client nodes to be able to connect to the pull server and how we want the node to behave.

The High Points

Examining the Local Configuration Manager

The Desired State Configuration agent included in Windows Management Framework 4 (or natively on Server 2012 R2 / Windows 8.1) is exposed through the Local Configuration Manager.

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PowerShell for Admins Tutorials
• 1 min read

Desired State Configuration – General Availability Changes

PowerShell DSC, along with Windows Server 2012 R2 has reached General Availability!  Yay!
However, there is (at least one so far) breaking change** **in Desired State Configuration (DSC).
Fortunately, the change is in an area I haven’t blogged about yet.. creating custom resources.  Unfortunately, it does mean I’ll have to update the GitHub repository and all my internal content (should be done by early next week).
The short version is that DSC resources are now resources inside modules, rather than each resource being independent modules.  The benefit of this is that now DSC resources won’t pollute the module scope, each resource won’t need its own psd1 file (the source module will require one though), and it provides an easier way to group resources, which wasn’t really possible before.
So, with GA, resources should go under the module root in a folder DSCResources.  You can have one or more resources in one PowerShell module.  The PowerShell module version is what will be used for the resource version number, so if you have several resources, a version number bump affects all the resources in the module.
I’ll be picking back up with the DSC series next week with how to configure DSC clients, so stay tuned.

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Tips and Tricks
• 4 min read

Building a Desired State Configuration Configuration – Part 2

Ok, let’s get back to creating a DSC configuration.  If you haven’t read the last post in this series, go back and do that now, I’ll wait.  Now with that out of the way, let’s get back to it…

The High Points

Picking Back UP

Now that we have some of the basics down, we can start to look deeper at how composable these configurations are. A DSC configuration defined in PowerShell offers several advantages, not the least of which is that a configuration can be parameterized.

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PowerShell for Admins Tutorials
• 7 min read

Building a Desired State Configuration Configuration

Now that’s a title!  We’ve worked through my reasoning as to why I want Desired State Configuration (DSC) and how to build a pull server.  Today and in the next post we are going to look at how to create configurations which describe how our target systems are supposed to work.

The High Points

Building Configurations

Configurations are the driving force for DSC.  A configuration is a Managed Object Format (MOF) document that describes the how a specified server (or servers) should look.

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PowerShell for Admins
• 3 min read

Building a Desired State Configuration Pull Server

Quick recap, I’m working through a series of posts about the Desired State Configuration infrastructure that I’m building at Stack Exchange, including some how-to’s.

The High Points

I started with an overview of what and why.  Today, I’m going to start the how.

Building a Pull Server

I’m going to describe how to do this with Server 2012 R2 RTM (NOTE: this is not the General Availability  release, so there may be changes at GA), since that’s the environment I’m working most in.  If there is enough demand, I may follow up with how to do this using the Windows Management Framework on downlevel operating systems after the GA version of WMF 4 is released.
The first step is adding the required roles and features, including the DSC Service.

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PowerShell for Admins Tutorials