Richard Siddaway's Blog

The PowerShell team have posted an update on what’s happening with DSC. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2018/01/26/dsc-planning-update-january-2018/

The interesting thing is the decoupling of the Local Configuration Manager from Windows. A new LCM that can use resources written in multiple languages sounds good – DSC on Linux can finally have custom written resources.

LCM will be open source

No comments on pull server in the post though – ideally pull server should be open source as well

DSC is a configuration management tool that first appeared in PowerShell v4 and was refined in PowerShell v5/5.1. Major changes are coming to DSC of which more later. DSC takes a configuration and applies it to a server. What about the situation where you have an existing server and want to derive a DSC configuration for it. Various home grown methods have been discussed at the PowerShell Summit, amongst others, but now we have Reverse DSC – https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/heyscriptingguy/2017/10/27/reverse-desired-state-configuration-how-it-works/

Reverse DSC is available for  SharePoint, SQLServer, RemoteDeskTopSession and PSDesiredStateConfiguration.  You do need the required resource module for Reverse DSC to work.

Reverse DSC uses the Get functions of resources to get the configuration information.

You get get hold of Reverse DSC, and contribute, at https://www.GitHub.com/Microsoft/ReverseDSC

I was incredibly excited when I first saw DSC – it was in April 2013 as a special MVP only preview at the first PowerShell Summit – as a work in progress. Since that time my excitement has waned to the point that I now ask DSC – the future?

Looking at the PowerShell Team announcement about the introduction of DSC core – https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2017/09/12/dsc-future-direction-update/

I have to question if a complete new version of DSC is worth my time investigating especially when backward compatibility isn’t guaranteed.

Don Jones has question where DSC is going – https://powershell.org/2017/09/13/the-future-of-powershells-desired-state-configuration/

Overall, I’d say that DSC has had a mixed success since its introduction due to changes and the difficulty around preforming some activities. The integration with Azure hasn’t been smooth.

Is it time to look at another configuration tool set. Microsoft’s  current rush to embrace Linux may make Chef or Puppet a better option for you. Read the comments on the PowerShell Team announcements to see what other people think about DSC.

DSC functions in 2 modes – push (most basic) and pull. Creating a pull server is a non-trivial task and the out-of-the-box pull server has some issues. Some of the folks at powershell.org have decided its time to build a better pull server.

There’s a project on github that supplies the code for the open source, cross platform, pull server project known as tug.  pull – tug – pull… you get the picture.

You can find the project at https://github.com/PowerShellOrg/tug

If you’re using DSC download it, give it a try and feed back to the project what you’ve discovered. 

A new set of repositories on Github document a process for sharing end-to-end scenario based DSC configurations

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2017/04/28/dsc-configuration-sharing/

These are open to community involvement

Two new modules of DSC resources are available:

OfficeOnlineServerDsc

SystemLocaleDsc

A number of updates to existing resources have been made available.

Details from https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/2016/09/21/dsc-resource-kit-september-release/

OMI – the Open Source CIM server is available on github

https://github.com/Microsoft/omi

This appears to be a later version than currently shown on the open group web site

Combine this with open source PowerShell

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell

and the DSC on Linux

https://github.com/Microsoft/PowerShell-DSC-for-Linux

And you have your basis for managing Linux machines

Nano Server is the minimalist version of Windows that Server 2016 introduces. I needed a target for DSC this afternoon so decided that I’d spin up a Nano Server instance – because they are very, very quick to create.

Unfortunately, Nano Server doesn’t support DSC out of the box. The ROOT\Microsoft\Windows\DesiredStateConfiguration CIM namespace isn’t available for instance.

You need to add the DSC bits when you create your Nano server – use

-Packages Microsoft-NanoServer-DSC-Package

on New-NanoServerImage when you generate the Nano server virtual disk.

see https://msdn.microsoft.com/powershell/dsc/nanodsc

for current restrictions and limitations of DSC on Nano server

The DSC resource kit is the primary place to look for DSC resources beyond those baked into Windows.

An update to the resources in the kit has been announced. Some new resources and lots of bug fixes.

see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2015/10/23/dsc-resource-kit-updates-are-here.aspx

for details

PowerShell DSC for Linux 1.1 has been released.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2015/09/30/powershell-dsc-for-linux-version-1-1-is-now-available-and-new-linux-resources.aspx

With bug fixes, support for the separation of configuration and node ids  and new resources this release makes it easier than ever to manage your Linux boxes through DSC