Configuration Management with Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC)

Keeping information system baselines consistent with a formal configuration management plan can be a very difficult task. Changes to server based systems and networking must be monitored in order to provide some measure of compliance.A new distributed configuration management platform by Microsoft(R) called Desired State Configuration (DSC) makes this task easier.The objective of this paper is to describe in depth how PowerShell 4.0 can help to solve this common problem. DSC uses a declarative syntax that any skilled administrator can utilize to deploy software, monitor configuration drift and even report conformance. DSC is cross-platform compatible with hundreds of useful resources freely available. DSC leverages PowerShell 4.0 and gives administrators a useful way to automate configuration management.