Thursday, December 24, 2009

PowerShell V2 Download

If you are running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2, then you will have PowerShell installed by default. On Windows 7, both the PowerShell console and PowerShell ISE are installed by default. On Server 2008 R2, PowerShell console is installed by default, whilst the PowerShell ISE is a feature you can add using Server Manager. And of course, for any Server 2008 R2 core installations, you would need to add both the .NET Framework and PowerShell – virtually nothing extra gets added to Server Core!

For downlevel (aka older) versions of Windows, Microsoft has released a KB article which directs you to versions you can download. Go to the page http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968929 where you can find PowerShell V2 for Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008 (RTM) – in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Note that in Server 2008 RTM, PowerShell is not supported in Server Core.

In addition to PowerShell V2, the downloads also include the RTM version of Windows Remote Management (WinRM). WinRM is Microsoft’s  implementation of the standards based WS-Management Protocol. WinRM is based on Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), and provides a firewall-friendly protocol enabling hardware and operating systems from different vendors to interoperate.

If you are are using an older OS, i.e. Windows 2000 or earlier, then there is no supported version of PowerShell for you. You can probably hack some or even most of PowerShell V2 into those older OSs. But things may not work – and it’s not ever going to be supported.

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