I’ve been working on building out some 2008 R2 Core servers the last couple days and of course I wanted to get PowerShell up and running on them.  First of all, to install the PowerShell feature you need to run this command

start /w ocsetup MicrosoftWindowsPowerShell

Note that ocsetup is case sensitive and you need to get the name of the feature and/or role exactly right.

Once you get the feature installed, you can launch powershell from the cmd prompt by using the full path to c:\windows\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0\powershell.exe.

Now that we have PowerShell V2 running, we can get-started with Remoting. To enable V2 remoting, there is a built-function called Enable-PSRemoting which typically is all you need. However, there is a known issue with Windows 7 Beta x64 systems where WOW components are not installed – a category which server core falls into.

If you try to enable remoting, you will get an error about a corrupted plugin in WSMAN.

To work around this, you need to remote a registry value. Run the following command

remove-item HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WSMAN\Plugin\Microsoft.PowerShell32

After that, you can run Enable-PSRemoting and you are good to go.

In a recent post from the PDC, Jeffrey Snover mentioned that all versions of Windows Server 2008 R2 will ship with PowerShell enabled.

It was mentioned briefly in his article, but just to be absolutely clear, PowerShell will be available on Server Core in 2008 R2. It will just need to be installed as a feature.