I’m sure for anyone who administers Microsoft Windows Server the Server Manager console is an all too familiar place. It does make it easy to add/remove roles and features however PowerShell is another great option that can really speed things up at times.

So – what can we do with PowerShell to list the roles and features on our Windows servers?

List Roles and Features

First let us look at how we can display a list of the roles and features on our server with PowerShell. The command we need is get-windowsfeature which will give us an output such as this –

This is a nice start however if you try the command yourself you will see that it scrolls down the screen listing every single role and feature along with any sub-components. This can be useful and indeed is one way to discover the names you require when building a command to install features however if we just want to see what is installed it is a bit poor.

How can we improve this? Well we have a few options, let us explore them.

Here we take advantage of a switch for this cmdlet. By using the -Name switch and appending a string we can get a list which matches our pattern – in this instance anything matching *Teln*.

It is also possible to pipe the cmdlet through a where clause filter which gives us the option of filtering against the ‘Install State’ –

We can use the same command syntax and use either a ‘Display Name’ or ‘Name’ value to restrict our search to that object as below –

As you see it is easy to select from the ‘Display Name’ or the ‘Name’ field.

Further Information

If you would like additional information then as ever Microsoft have a full reference – https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj205469.aspx

There are options for running this command against a remote machine but I will be writing a post for remote PowerShell which will cover this type of functionality.

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