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I am wondering which is best practice considering both examples will probably work. Using the built in help examples I have written a script to install windows features on remote servers. Here is my code:

$servers = ('server1', 'server2', 'server3', 'server4')

ForEach ($server in $servers) {
    Install-WindowsFeature -Name Desktop-Experience -ComputerName $server -IncludeAllSubFeature -IncludeManagementTools -Restart
}

Would the above be preferred OR should I wrap the "Install-WindowsFeature ..." in an "Invoke-Command" block like the following?

Invoke-Command -ComputerName server1, server2, server3, server4 -command {
    Install-WindowsFeature -Name Desktop-Experience -ComputerName $server -IncludeAllSubFeature -IncludeManagementTools -Restart
}

Thanks for your insight!

Stephen Trapanese
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1 Answers1

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Personally I would use the latter (directly call Install-WindowsFeature -ComputerName $server rather than do a separate Invoke-Command) in this case for the following reasons:

  1. You may be hard-coding the feature names now, but in the future you may want to put those in a variable. If you put them in a variable, you'll have to pass it as a parameter into the Invoke-Command's script block. This is entirely possible, but more work.
  2. By using your own loop, you can write progress messages, logging, etc.
  3. You gain nothing by using Invoke-Command in this case because you're running a single command on the remote computer (as opposed to running multiple commands with -ComputerName parameters vs. running multiple commands inside the script block).
briantist
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