Deploying WMF 5.0

PowerShell Help
1

Greetings,

I have been given approval to deploy WMF 5.0 onto our server and workstation base.
Servers are a mix of 2008 and 2012 and workstations are all Win7.
I am aware of the prereqs (e.g. wmf 4.0 and > dotnet 4.5).
SCCM and WSUS options are not available. What would people recommend as the best alternative for deployment?
Also, any known application incompatibilities other than those listed in the release notes? (e.g. dont install on SCCM servers!)
I’m thinking citrix hosts might be an issue, or vmware hosts?
Thanks
David

2

If I wouldn’t have the option to use agent-based software like SCCM and/or WSUS I would leverage a combination of scheduled tasks calling PowerShell scripts placed onto the servers via file share to download the prereqs and WMF 5.0 from an internal or external web server and install in the correct order, and PowerShell Remoting to check the status of the servers and inititate reboots if necessary.

The reason I would use scheduled tasks to install the Windows updates is that the Windows updates installer does not work well within a PowerShell Remoting session.

If you don’t have the option to use PowerShell Remoting you can leverage WMI to execute the installation packages which makes things even more complicated.

P.S.: Anyone else reading my reply, please don’t hesitate to reply with more ideas or correct me.

3

I would with the chocolatey approach they have the package posted here:

https://chocolatey.org/packages/PowerShell

4

Thanks - but chocolatey requires additional expense for thousands of machines.

5

Setting up the scheduled tasks on all machines sounds way to difficult.
I think startup scripts are probably the easiest.

6

I’ve been able to extract the cab file from an MSU using WUSA and install the package using DISM as somewhat of a workaround for the issue with WUSA not working through remoting. I had no plans to script such an install in production but I did have an answer from an older post of mine and cobbled the following together, which worked on a test VM that had .NET Framework 4.5.2 and PSv4 already installed.

$cred = Get-Credential
Invoke-Command -ComputerName PC001 -ScriptBlock {
Start-Process -FilePath wusa.exe -ArgumentList '"\\server\share\Win7AndW2K8R2-KB3134760-x64.msu" /extract:C:\MSU\' -Wait

Start-Process -FilePath dism.exe -ArgumentList '/online /add-package /PackagePath:C:\MSU\Windows6.1-KB3134760-x64.cab /NoRestart' -Wait

Remove-Item C:\MSU -Recurse -Force

Restart-Computer -Force
} -Credential $cred -Authentication CredSsp

This is obviously a very crude example of installing WMF5 on a single remote computer but it’s a good example of how to get around the WUSA restriction over remoting.