Anyway, I'm working on some Powershell scripts for work, and I'm stuck on something I thought would be fairly simple. Basically, there are some tasks that I need to perform on our Exchange server that would be great to script. I spent time writing a script that would connect me to our server (on the same domain), and run invoke-command for a few test commands. Once I get the test commands running, I can actually start writing the meat of the script.
For now however, I'm stuck just getting get-mailbox to return any information, which is really just me trying to test that things are working. See the three lines of test code here:
$mainSession = New-PSSession -ComputerName TheServerName
invoke-command -session $mainSession -ScriptBlock {add-pssnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.Powershell.Admin}
invoke-command -session $mainSession -ScriptBlock {get-mailbox}
I get a "psremotingtransportexception" exception with a "Job_Failure" error. What could this be? I know the snap-in and get-mailbox commands work when I actually log-in to the server via remote-desktop and test them out. Assuming I can get get-mailbox to function, I could actually perform the more complicated tasks I want to put in the script. The Exchange Server I'm connecting to is pretty old (2007?), so it's not that I'm using the wrong snap-in. Am I missing some credentials? Right now it's not asking me for any, but I tried adding the -credential flag and that didn't help either.
I'm super new to Powershell, so any help is greatly appreciated. Here is the exact error, apologies for the crap formatting:
Processing data for a remote command failed with the following error message: The WSMan provider host process did not return a proper response. A provider in the host process may have behaved improperly. For more information, see the about_Remote_Troubleshooting Help topic. + CategoryInfo : OperationStopped: (System.Manageme...pressionSyncJob:PSInvokeExpressionSyncJob) [], PSRemotingTransportException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : JobFailure
I should mention that I already tried increasing the shell MB size via set-item wsman:\localhost\shell\MaxMemoryPerShellMB 1024 -force. My best guess is this has something to do with the -credential flag but so far I haven't had any success with it.
Official support for remote Exchange administration with PowerShell was added in Exchange 2010, I believe.
It seems at least one person has found a way to make it work with Exchange 2007.
Sorry for the link-only answer, but the solution seems to be pretty involved, using impersonation, a special user account created for this purpose, script modules that have to be installed on the exchange server, etc.
Given this solution, I wonder if you could make it work more simply by using a PowerShell endpoint running as an exchange administrator. That would be cleaner than this mess. Basically you would create the endpoint, set the RunAsUser, and then you could use StartupScript to add the snapin. I really can't say if this will work though and I have no access to a Exchange 2007 environment where I could test it.