Windows PowerShell™ 2 For Dummies®

Chapter 15. PowerShell Ninjas: Running Jobs Remotely or in the Background

In This Chapter

• Multitasking with background jobs

• Managing background jobs

• Administering commands remotely

Most of what I've done (and continue to do on a daily basis) is geared to system automation. Whether you're managing tens of thousands of computers or managing a few of servers, one thing remains the same: To be efficient, you need to be able to manage all those systems easily from a central management point. Sure, you have plenty of ways to manage systems remotely, such as by using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), but sometimes even that method has drawbacks, such as reduced performance.

Now you can use Windows PowerShell 2 to run Cmdlets remotely. Another new feature you can take advantage of in Windows PowerShell 2 is the ability to run background jobs, which means that you can run Cmdlets and other things in the background while you do something else.

In this chapter, you explore one of the most compelling reasons for using Windows PowerShell 2, which is to run commands in the background as well as running commands on remote computers that are also running Windows PowerShell 2. This gives you the ability to run more things in parallel and take full advantage of all the PowerShell commands on remote computers just as if you were physically there.

Using Background Jobs

If you open Windows Task Manager, you'll see a bunch of running processes, most of which are processes that you don't use interactively ...