Chapter 12. PowerShell workflows
This chapter covers
- Workflow overview and architecture
- Workflow keywords
- Workflow parameters
- Workflow cmdlets
“Hi ho, hi ho. It’s off to work we go!”
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
At the beginning of every new release of PowerShell, a planning cycle takes place during which a number of major themes are identified for the release. During the planning cycle for PowerShell v3, one of the key themes was identified as multi-machine management—the ability to provision, manage, and monitor a large number of machines in a datacenter. Accomplishing this goal, however, would require changing not only PowerShell but also some related products such as Server Manager.
In Windows 7, which included PowerShell v2 and the first version of Server Manager, the focus was mainly on machine-to-machine management. Server Manager could attach to a remote machine but could manage only one machine at a time. PowerShell was a bit more sophisticated in that it could deal with multiple machines but only if you wanted to do the same thing to each machine.