PowerShell 3 integrates with Windows Workflow Foundation, Task Scheduler and comes with new features such as easier scripting, 10x more cmdlets and tool building enhancements. These make PowerShell even more useful in DevOps, says Jeffrey Snover, Lead Architect for Windows Server Division.
Jeffrey recently published a couple of articles detailing how some of the new features in Powershell 3 help improve DevOps. Some of these features are -
- 10 times more cmdlets (2430) than in Powershell 2 (~230) – cmdlets for networking, storage, clustering, DNS, file servers, etc - In short, more out-of-the-box automation
- Ability to leverage Windows Workflow Foundation
- Improved WMI Experience
- Ability to use Task scheduler to schedule Background jobs
- Sessions can survive network interruptions upto 3 minutes – sessions can also be disconnected and reconnected later, even from another machine (like remote desktop)
We have already covered a more complete list of features that are new in PowerShell 3 on InfoQ.
Windows PowerShell is Microsoft's task automation framework, consisting of a command-line shell and associated scripting languagebuilt on top of, and integrated with the .NET Framework. It is popular, but by no means the only option – there are other orchestration frameworks like Chef and Puppet which have their own advantages, and one of them is being cross-platform.
PowerShell 3 can be downloaded as a part of Windows Management Framework 3.0 RC (for working with Windows 7 family) or as a part of Windows 2012 Server RC.