PowerPack for non-Windows management in SCCM and SCOM

Quest loves PowerShell and many Quest teams have implemented powershell interfaces to their IT management products – I from my side am obviously willing to promote and encourage these efforts.

Our Quest Management Xtensions team is in charge of over 400 (!) extensions to Microsoft Systems Center, letting you use Operations Manager, Configuration Manager, and Opalis with variety of non-Microsoft platforms.

And today I am excited to announce that this team released a PowerPack for their tool! So not only can you get more out of your Systems Center tools, you can also now get extensible alternative user interface to the tools, and can further automate various operations with PowerShell.

You can learn more about Management Xtensions and download them here, and the PowerPack here.

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TechEd Video: NetApp’s Glenn Sizemore Demonstrates their PowerPack

If you have not seen yet the amazing PowerShell work which NetApp team has done to vastly improve their storage manageability and get more agile – here’s a quick video interview and demo which I recorded at TechEd 2011 in Atlanta last month:

If this got you interested, you can download the NetApp PowerPack for free here.

For those who want some additional sqoop here are:

• Inside story of NetApp PowerGUI PowerPack, and
• Official NetApp PowerPack announcement.

Got blade chassis with HP Virtual Connect?

Manage them with PowerShell and PowerGUI!

Just download Adam’s HP Virtual Connect Management powerpack here, and you will be able to:

• Configure Networks, uplink sets and server profiles
• Create, edit and delete users
• Configure LDAP settings for authentication
• View and edit SNMP settings
• View and configure uplink ports and check statistics
• Power on & off servers
• View system log

And much more. All from a convenient rich client (or your PowerShell scripts)!

Another enterprise systems joins the PowerShell realms. Another case of the jug filling drop by drop. 😉

Download Adam’s HP Virtual Connect Management powerpack here and leave there comments so Adam knows what you think!

JAMS Job Scheduler PowerPack

Workload automation and job scheduling in the enterprise environments is not a trivial tasks. Luckily there are tools out there to help you, and even more luckily some of them have PowerShell interfaces, and – here comes the best part – one of them, JAMS Job Scheduler – now even has a PowerGUI PowerPack so you can perform advanced bulk management and customize the tool right in the PowerGUI Admin Console!

If you already own JAMS Job Scheduler, download the powerpack here and start taking full advantage of it.

If you want to learn more about JAMS, you can read all the information, watch the training videos and download the tool at http://jamsscheduler.com/JobScheduling.aspx

JAMS Job Scheduler powerpack is participating in the PowerGUI Challenge 2010. Got a great powerpack idea? Take part in the contest – there are 10 more days to submit your PowerPack or Editor Add-On and win some cool prizes!

PKI Management Console 1.5

Vadim‘s enterprise certificate management PowerPack went 1.5 and got significantly enhanced. The new features include:

• Native use of Quest AD Cmdlets (version 1.4.2) – so better performance and the code which is easier to understand.
• Additional error handling.
• Certification Authorities information includes CA CRL status.
• New Active Directory PKI node that contains the most common AD PKI-related containers. You can review container contents and publish/unpublish certificates/CRLs by using new actions.
• Now the PowerPack correctly retrieves all available Enterprise OCSP Responders even if they are not running CA service.
• For Certificates node now has two subcontainers: Certificates and CRLs. This allows you to browse both — certificates and CRLs in the local certificate store. For CRLs added new basic actions.
• Graphical dialog boxes for certificate export and import actions.

And of course it still has the great functionality from previous versions:

Here’s a very quick summary of some of the features his tool has:

• Certificate Authorities management:
  • CRL Distribution Points (CDP)
  • Authority Information Access (AIA) settings
  • Review CRLs
  • Publish new CRLs
  • Change CRL publishing periods including overlap settings
  • Revoked Certificates
  • Issued Certificates
  • Pending requests
  • Failed requests
  • Issued certificate templates
  • Revoke/unrevoke certificates
  • Issue or deny pending requests for certificates
  • Add/remove certificate templates to issue
  • Change CRL/CRT/OCSP URL priorities
• Local certificate store management:
  • Import/Export certificates using various certificate types (such CER/pkcs12/pkcs7/SST)
  • Copy/move certificates between stores
  • Delete certificate from store
  • Validate certificates passing them through certificate chaining engine
  • Sign files
• Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) Responders management
  • Review and change OCSP Responder settings
  • Change OCSP URL priorities

All of these support bulk operations, filtering, and reporting. All are available with their source PowerShell code for your reference and scripting.

Learn more about the Enterprise PKI PowerPack and download it here.

Join the VMware Community PowerPack project

Alan Renouf has completely open-sourced one of the most popular virtualization management tools out there – VMware Community PowerPack. This is a free custom add-on (also known as Virtu-Al PowerPack ;)) for PowerGUI/VESI and it has already been downloaded more than 10,000 times!

For all this time, the PowerPack (as actually any PowerGUI pack) has been open source in the sense that you could see the PowerShell code behind it and modify it for your personal needs. What is changing is that now the pack itself becomes a community effort and you can (in fact, in my opinion, should ;)) contribute back to make it better.

Go to the VMware Community PowerPack to join the project!

Security Webcast is Today

[UPDATE] Recording of this webcast is available here.

Today at 11:00 AM EDT Randy F. Smith from Ultimate Windows Security is holding a webinar on using PowerShell to ensure Active Directory and Windows Server security. The webcast is sponsored by Quest and free to attend.

Pre-registration is required and the space is limited so you might want to register right away here.

Learn more about the PowerShell AD/Windows security webinar here.

More Amazon S3 cmdlets and PowerPack

Folks at CloudBerry Lab have just updated their PowerShell snapin for Amazon and posted a PowerPack at PowerGUI.org.

I have blogged about S3 cmdlets before, but it looks like in the past year CloudBerry Lab has been busy adding a lot more functionality! Some of the new cmdlets are strikingly cool. 🙂

For example, Copy-CloudSyncFolders allows you to schedule synchronization between your local computer and S3.

Get-CloudUrl generates temporary protected URLs for both Amazon S3 and CloudFront. I can imagine using this cmdlet to bulk-produce temporary links for your website or set of resources.

You can find full info about the snapin here.

But wait, there is more! They have also created a PowerPack for PowerGUI!

Looks like so far the PowerPack is mostly limited to browsing S3 but you can obviously use CloudBerry’s cmdlets to add more actions or submit your feedback/requests by posting comments to the PowerPack’s page.

Read more about the PowerPack here, download it here.

PowerPack for VHD/VDI/VMDK Inventory

If you like myself have a bunch of virtual machine on your laptop you are going to love the Virtual Disk Inventory PowerPack which Kenneth Bell has just posted.

The pack quickly gives you a list of the VHD, VDI, and VMDK files you have on the computer, and for each machine provides information on the computer name and operating system:

Now if only this was integrated with the VMware and Hyper-V PowerPacks, as well as Virtu-Al’s masterpiece so I could actually start the machines and perform other actions with them… Anyone? 😉

Video: NetPoint meets PowerGUI

Discover and manage hardware and software resources in your network with NetPoint and PowerGUI PowerPack built for it.

In this video Shannon Ma walks Darin Pendergraft through a demo of the tool:

The tool itself is pretty amazing. Right inside PowerGUI you can discover hardware and software you have on computers in your network, and then do a bunch of tasks based on the resources you find, such as:

Systems:
– Run a command
– Log off
– Reboot
– Shutdown

Logical Disks:
– Run Chkdsk
– Run Autochk on Reboot

Network Adapters:
– Enable
– Disable
– Renew DHCP Lease
– Release DHCP Lease
– Set Static IP Address
– Set Auto Obtain IP Address
– Set Primary DNS Suffix
– Append DNS Suffixes

Printers:
– Print Test Page
– Cancel Jobs
– Pause
– Resume

Programs:
– Uninstall a Windows Installer based program

Services:
– Pause
– Resume
– Start
– Stop
– Set Startup Mode
– Change Log On Account

Watch the video above and then get the PowerPack here.