Richard Hicks' Forefront TMG Blog

If you perform any sort of Windows troubleshooting at all, no doubt you have used some of Mark Russinovich’s wonderful Sysinternals Utilities Suite. If not, you are seriously missing out on some valuable diagnostic tools! I use Process Explorer and Process Monitor on an almost daily basis, as I am sure many of you do as well. Other than attending one of Mark’s or David Solomon’s TechEd presentations, training for these tools has been limited. The good news is that soon Microsoft will be releasing the Windows Systernals Administrator’s Reference. This book will be a definite must have for anyone serious about performing diagnostics on the Windows platform. It is available now for pre-order on Amazon.com, so be sure and order your copy today. I did!

Windows Server 2008 includes a command-line utility called servermanagercmd.exe that allows administrators to configure roles, role services, and features from the command line. Beginning with Windows Server 2008 R2, however, servermanagercmd.exe has been deprecated. When you attempt to run servermanagercmd.exe you will receive the following message:

Servermanagercmd.exe is deprecated, and is not guaranteed to be supported in future releases of Windows. We recommend that you use the Windows PowerShell cmdlets that are available for Server Manager.

Servermanagercmd.exe has been replaced with new PowerShell Server Manager cmdlets (pronounced ‘command-lets’). Before we can use these new cmdlets we must first import them. Open an elevated PowerShell command prompt and enter the following command:

import-module servermanager

Here are the three new PowerShell cmdlets and their corresponding servermanagercmd.exe equivalents [in brackets]:

Add-WindowsFeature [servermanagercmd.exe –install]

Remove-WindowsFeature [servermanagercmd.exe –remove]

For more information regarding the new PowerShell cmdlets and servermanagercmd.exe, please refer to the Overview of Server Manager Commands article on Microsoft Technet.