PowerShell DateTime to CIM_DateTime

Obviously no one that is using PowerShell is using WSMAN against a remote Linux system.  Everything assumes WMI, simple enough.

Use WSMAN against Linux and you enter into a insane land of XML and properly formatting your XML.

Take for example the simple act to send an XML string that queries a time period.

In PowerShell you type Get-Date and you get a nice, human friendly value back: Wednesday, May 05, 2010 10:24:14 AM

Now, try to send that to a CIM provider of any type (in my case a CIM provider that sits behind a WSMAN interface) and you immediately get a value invalid error.

off to Bing-land.. searching, searching, searching – absolutely nothing.  Wait, there are a couple useful things…

on MSDN the Scripting API Objects, the SWbemDateTime Object.  The what?  you say.  Isn’t it obvious? (I didn’t think so).

Here is the kicker, the CIM_DateTime format.  It expects this really strange format that looks like this:  yyyymmddHHMMSS.mmmmmmsUUU

So how do I take this:  Wednesday, May 05, 2010 10:24:14 AM and turn it into this: 20100505102415.000000-420

I have to play with objects in PowerShell, here is my script part:

$startTimeWindow = ((Get-Date) - $9Minutes)
$objScriptTime = New-Object -ComObject WbemScripting.SWbemDateTime
$objScriptTime.SetVarDate($startTimeWindow)
$startTime = $objScriptTime.Value

I first set my time window to begin 9 minutes before ‘now’.  I then create a SWbemDateTime object from the Wbem.Scripting class.  I then take the start of my time window and set this friendly formatted time to the object.  Then I retrieve the value of the object and I have a CIM_DateTime to send off to my Linux system CIM interface (through WSMAN).

Configuring Hyper-V remote management

Configuring remote management and delegating permissions to non-administrators has been one of the biggest stumbling items for many.

John Howard from Microsoft has been blogging about this extensively and until a short while back it was complex and complicated.

Kerberos tickets, domains, Authorization Manager, SP1 for Vista, etc.

To make it all easier - There is the Hyper-V Remote Management Configuration Utility.
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/HVRemote

John Howard talks about it here:
http://blogs.technet.com/jhoward/archive/2008/11/14/configure-hyper-v-remote-management-in-seconds.aspx

Remotely managing Server Core using compmgmt.msc

We all have those days when we want a nice graphical view of a Windows server so we can quickly compare installations, we can't remember the command line syntax properly, or (as some CLI zealots would put it) we just want a nice lazy interface.

Well, if you try to connect to Server Core - we all have run into the standard firewall rule of enabling Remote Management on Server Core. Well...this is just a portion of the picture.

What if you want to bring a disk volume on-line (this is what brought me to this in the first place), and you don't want to type and then take it back off-line. (darn it, I want my right click - I want to do this relatively quickly, and I don't want to fish around for the CLI commands).

My Google-fu was working well this morning and I found an excellent posting by Sander Berkouwer about getting all the rules and settings right to remotely administer a Server Core WS08 install using the Computer Management MMC snap-in.

Here it is:
http://blogs.dirteam.com/blogs/sanderberkouwer/archive/2008/04/03/remotely-managing-your-server-core-using-compmgmt-msc.aspx