Windows PowerShell Cookbook, 3rd Edition

Chapter 30. Workflows

Introduction

When you’re writing PowerShell scripts to automate administrative tasks, solutions of increasing scale and scope quickly fall within reach. Once you’re automating solutions on the local system, PowerShell Remoting quickly lets you start duplicating those tasks across many machines. And once you’re duplicating tasks across many machines, it’s not long until you’re orchestrating large-scale, coordinated, multimachine sequences.

Coordinating robust, long-running, reliable, multimachine sequences is a significant challenge in a networked environment. Remote connectivity needs to be ubiquitous and consistent. Machine connections need to be managed, pooled, and maintained. Network interruptions should be expected and recovered from. Tasks should let you suspend, unload, and resume them without losing either state or sequence.

And while solving all of that, you still need to be sure not to paint yourself into a corner with an obscure custom implementation. PowerShell will continue to add new functionality. The community will continue to extend PowerShell with new commands. Others are tackling these multimachine sequences and will share their results. Just as you benefit from shared PowerShell scripts, you should benefit from them sharing their efforts, as well.

Solving this complex nest of problems was one of the main focuses of PowerShell version 3.

Write a Workflow

Problem

You want to write a workflow to automate a robust, long-running, multimachine PowerShell ...