re: Opsware Announces PowerShell Support

PowerShell Team — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 05:51:17 GMT

Jeffrey,

Paul Kennedy from Opsware here... I've been ill recently, have been catching up this past weekend, and I saw your note.

Yes, Opsware productized the PowerShell support we've been working on for a while :) In the first release we have a set of cmdlets that allow a user to extract information on servers, jobs, audit results and the like from the Opsware data repository, via WS-API. There are also cmdlets which allow a user to update the data repository. We also have a PowerShell provider allowing a user to navigate about the objects in the data repository - this is the productized version of the prototype provider you saw back in 2005.

But this is just the beginning. We are hard at work on version 2 of the integration, it's a much broader and deeper integration. For example,

- From one's own desktop machine, one will be able to open a remote PowerShell prompt, in a seperate window, to any server running PowerShell which is managed by Opsware, in the datacenter. And that server can be any number of switches and firewalls away from your desktop, the communcation channel is securely maintained by the Opsware infrastructure.

- We will have distributed PowerShell script support across several features, including Audit & Remediation, allowing a user to run PowerShell scripts to query or modify server settings across server groups, simultaneously.

- We will have a pretty neat scriptblock remoting capability too, allowing one to run a scriptblock on any Opsware managed server in the datacenter,

Back when we met in 2005, we were a single product company, the Server Automation System, but now we have Storage, Network and Process automation products. So as far as I'm concerned, we've got a lot of PowerShell integration work ahead of us. Who do I say that ? Well, over the last several months, I have spent a fair amount of time talking to fellow engineers, to prospects and to existing customers about PowerShell and our integration story. And I can tell you that people love this stuff.

We've focussed our efforts on Server Automation System integration thus far, but - so long as it makes sense for the network enginers and storage admins and other specialized end users of our products - why not bring the benefits of PowerShell integration to those other domains, allowing people to manage EMC syms, Storage arrays, Switches,Routers, Firewalls etc, from PowerShell.

Regards,

Pk.