[martin1975]

Never was much of a windows fan, so a (slightly ignorant) question for someone who is a Win admin - can most administrative things nowadays be done via the command line on Windows (like we've been able to do in *nix land) or is there a gap between what can be done via the GUI vs the command line?

[tammer]

From a sysadmin in the field - it's complicated.

New Server features are primarily controllable via PowerShell and now only secondarily expose a bit of control via GUI. So, indeed PowerShell has taken precedence. However, it would be wrong to say that Windows administration is exactly like managing Unix systems. On the contrary, the more one works with it the more one realizes PowerShell is the anti-Bash.

Lacking in the aeons of interface legacy built into standard Unices, you won't find standbys like 'grep' readily available or even easily implemented. Rather, PowerShell is built from the ground up for scripting. While the addition of SSH will certainly be helpful for quickly checking statuses, (and possibly more in the future should readline usability of PowerShell improve) right now most PowerShell interactions happen via scripting from a local workstation or web or application inputs rather than directly via the interactive shell.

[rodgerd]

Microsoft are pushing the command line to the point that:

a) Many operations in newer bits of Windows have simple-mode available in the GUI, but more sophisticated options must be scripted. StorageSpaces has a few examples of this, where some of the options around tiered storage, SSD caching, and the layout of pools can only be accessed via posh.

b) Microsoft are pushing completely headless versions of Windows Server for 2016.

[0xFFC]

About headless version , it is so great to hear that , although I am not using windows , but hearing that is good news overall , it seems with new CEO Microsoft back on truck . I would not remember with ballmer they released windows server with Metro UI . WTF !

[Sanddancer]

Yep. Recent windows servers even default to boot straight to console these days, with none of the GUI services running. MS has realized that centralized deployment and maintenance is really useful and is acting accordingly, hence things like openssh for windows.

[detaro]

(From what I've heard from people using them) On the current server versions, PowerShell should allow to do all that the GUI can do. There is a GUI-less version and I think the GUI actually uses PowerShell underneath, so you can look up in a log how the commands look like for something you only knew how to do graphically before.

[TTPrograms]

That is so cool. I have to look into this...