Sharepoint 2010 : Windows PowerShell Remoting (part 1)

Windows PowerShell offers great remote features through Windows Remote Management. Windows Remote Management is the Microsoft implementation of the WS-Management console protocol, which is a SOAP-based protocol designed as a common way for exchanging management information between heterogeneous systems.

To run Windows PowerShell remotely, you need to enable Windows Remote Management, which is included in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 Release 2. Enabling Windows Remote Management requires administrative privileges.

Figure 1 demonstrates running the Enable-PSRemoting cmdlet to configure the computer to receive Windows PowerShell remote commands that are sent using the WS-Management protocol. With this set up, you can run Windows PowerShell commands remotely from a different computer on the network.

Figure 1. Enabling Windows Remote Management

Running SharePoint 2010 cmdlets in a remote session also has two additional implications that you must consider:

• Authentication The Windows Remote Management (or WinRM, which is the “backbone” for PowerShell remoting) supports a variety of authentication mechanisms, from clear password-based to Kerberos. However, since many of the SharePoint 2010 cmdlets communicate directly with the SQL server, they require a means of securely delegating a user’s credentials from the remote client through the SharePoint 2010 server and onto the backend server (scenario commonly known as “double hop”). The authentication protocol that does this best for WinRM is Microsoft’s Credential Security Support Provider (CredSSP), which means it must be enabled for you to be able to use SharePoint 2010 cmdlets and object model remotely. You can enable CredSSP on the server using the following command:

       PS > Enable-WSManCredSSP -Role Server
  

  It is also required to enable CredSSP on each client as demonstrated here:

       PS > Enable-WSManCredSSP -role client -delegatecomputer
       SPServer01.powershell.nu
  

• Memory Limit WinRM implements a set of quotas for remote users, designed to make the service more robust and reliable. One of such quotas is the maximum amount of memory that can be allocated to a remote shell, which by default is set to 150MB. Now, some SharePoint 2010 cmdlets can potentially use large amounts of memory (even with all the memory management logic in place), which means they can fail if run in this default configuration. If you run SharePoint 2010 cmdlets remotely you should consider increasing the quota setting to at least 1000MB as demonstrated here:

       PS > Set-Item WSMan:\localhost\Shell\MaxMemoryPerShellMB 1000