Patch and reboot script for an entire Exchange environment, Part 3

The first part of the script body gets the current window title, then checks if transcript is running, starting it if not.

Since the script can’t use remote PowerShell to connect to an Exchange server that will be rebooted, the snap-in is loaded locally.

If the SCOM variable is set to true, then the remote PowerShell connection to the RMS is loaded.

Throughout the script you will see that whenever something is output to the console it is prefixed with the time. This is accomplished with a function to format it the way I want to see it.

This is the function to connect to the SCOM RMS:

The function creates a new session to the RMS, scoping the variable as $global so that if the script aborts and you restart it in the same shell, the session can still be used instead of creating a new one. Once the session is established, several script blocks are executed in it to load the SCOM snap-in and configure it so that a server can be put into maintenance mode. It took some time to figure out how to do all this because the PowerShell documentation for SCOM is very poor and code samples on other sites were for working with clusters or doing other tasks. If no error occurs during any of this, a variable is set to indicate that the session is working. If an error does occur, the script does not abort. I only treat this as a warning since an inability to put a server into maintenance shouldn’t keep the server from being patched. The status variable is set so that the script won’t try and put servers into maintenance mode if doing so will only result in an error anyway.

The next post in the series will get into the actual processing of the servers.
Download the complete script:

  Reboot-ExchangeServers.zip (7.5 KiB)

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