Windows Management Framework V5 Preview

I know there is a lot of cool stuff going on right now and Microsoft announced a lot of new things. Like Windows Phone 8.1, Cortana, Windows 8.1 Update, Visual Studio 2013 Update 2, Windows Universal Apps, the Nokia Lumia 630, 635 and 930 and much much more. But there just was another announcement from Jeffrey Snover which is really interesting for us automation and management guys. Today Microsoft announced the Windows Management Framework 5.0 Preview, which brings some new stuff to PowerShell and PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC).

In the release 5.0 of the Windows Management Framework Microsoft did some work on DSC to make it more stable and reliable by addressing bug fixes, performance improvements and general optimizations. But there are coming the new feature to Windows PowerShell.

Windows PowerShell OneGet

• Manage a list of software repositories in which packages can be searched, acquired, and installed
• Search and filter your repositories to find the packages you need
• Seamlessly install and uninstall packages from one or more repositories with a single PowerShell command

Network Switches

Microsoft will offere a new PowerShell module which brings the possibility to manage Network Switches. In this release Microsoft added a set of L2 Layer NetworkSwitch management PowerShell cmdlets to manage Certified for Windows network switches. This effort was part of the Data Center Abstraction (DAL) vision which was led by Microsoft working closely with industry leaders in this space such as: Arista, Cisco and Huawei. Using Windows Server 2012 R2, network switches that pass the Certified for Windows program can now be managed natively by System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 (SCVMM) without the need to write custom plugins.

I think this is not just a small announcement, this is a pretty big one to me.

Get more Information on the Windows Server Blog about the Windows Management Framework V5 Preview.