Managing Exchange 2000/2003 using PowerShell part 2

Managing Exchange 2000/2003 using PowerShell - Part 1
Managing Exchange 2000/2003 using PowerShell - Part 3

I'm going to start off with by referring to an Exchange 2000 article called Automating Exchange 2000 Management with Windows Script Host, since it set's the scene quite nicely for WMI based management for Exchange 2000. Exchange 2000 introduced a set of new WMI classes, and Exchange 2003 introduced a few more. PowerShell is renowned as an Exchange 2007 tool, however here were going to learn to use it to manage just about anything that has a MWI provider, with Exchange 2000/3 as my focus for today.

To show off what PowerShell can do I'm going to contrast a few PowerShell one-liners with the equivalent scripts taken from the Exchange 2000 article mentioned above.

get-wmiobject ExchangeServerState -Namespace "root\cimv2\applications\exchange" -ComputerName 2000server

HERE IS SOME SAMPLE vbscript TO DO THE SAME THING:

Sample 1 Using the ExchangeServerState WMI class

   1:' VBScript script listing all ExchangeServerState names and properties       

   2:' available with the WMI Exchange 2000 provider.  

   .: 

   9:Option Explicit 

  10: 

  11:Const cComputerName = "LocalHost" 

  12:Const cWMINameSpace = "root/cimv2/applications/exchange" 

  13:Const cWMIInstance  = "ExchangeServerState" 

  ..: 

  ..: 

  24:Set ExchangeServerList = _ 

                  GetObject("winmgmts:{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!//" &  

  25:                       cComputerName & "/" & _ 

  26:                       cWMINameSpace).InstancesOf(cWMIInstance) 

  27: 

  28:For each ExchangeServer in ExchangeServerList 

  29:    WScript.Echo "---------------------------------------------" 

  30:    WScript.Echo "Name: " & ExchangeServer.Name 

  31:    WScript.Echo "DN: " & ExchangeServer.Dn 

  32:    WScript.Echo "GUID: " & ExchangeServer.Guid 

  33:    WScript.Echo "Version: " & ExchangeServer.Version 

  34:    WScript.Echo "GroupDN: " & ExchangeServer.GroupDN 

  35:    WScript.Echo "Unreachable: " & ExchangeServer.Unreachable 

  36: 

  37:    WScript.Echo "ServerMaintenance: " & ExchangeServer.ServerMaintenance 

  38: 

  39:    WScript.Echo "ServerStateString: " & ExchangeServer.ServerStateString 

  40:    WScript.Echo "ServerState: " & ExchangeServer.ServerState 

  41: 

  42:    WScript.Echo "QueuesStateString: " & ExchangeServer.QueuesStateString 

  43:    WScript.Echo "QueuesState: " & ExchangeServer.QueuesState 

  44: 

  45:    WScript.Echo "DisksStateString: " & ExchangeServer.DisksStateString 

  46:    WScript.Echo "DisksState: " & ExchangeServer.DisksState 

  47: 

  48:    WScript.Echo "MemoryStateString: " & ExchangeServer.MemoryStateString 

  49:    WScript.Echo "MemoryState: " & ExchangeServer.MemoryState 

  50: 

  51:    WScript.Echo "CPUStateString: " & ExchangeServer.CPUStateString 

  52:    WScript.Echo "CPUState: " & ExchangeServer.CPUState 

  53: 

  54:    WScript.Echo "ClusterStateString: " & _ 

                      ExchangeServer.ClusterStateString 

  55:    WScript.Echo "ClusterState: " & ExchangeServer.ClusterState 

  56: 

  57:    WScript.Echo "ServicesStateString: " & _ 

                      ExchangeServer.ServicesStateString 

  58:    WScript.Echo "ServicesState: " & ExchangeServer.ServicesState 

  59:Next 

  ..: 

  ..: 

  ..:

My PowerShell script connects to a machine called "2000Server". The VBScript sample connect to localhost. Adjust the names to suit your environment and run both.  PowerShell has the advantage of auto rendering the object and displaying the objects properties when it returns. In VBScript, we need to know the objects properties in order to display them. I hope you're seeing that PowerShell is a pretty cool tool when it comes to Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003. In my next post, I'll be writing more on what else we can do with WMI and other things in Exchange 2000?

If you liked this article and would like to see more about PowerShell and Exchange, then check out BlankMan's blog (that's me) on http://blankmanblog.spaces.live.com/. Please also leave me a comment on what you do and don't like.

Managing Exchange 2000/2003 using PowerShell - Part 1
Managing Exchange 2000/2003 using PowerShell - Part 3