Iron Scripter 2019 Prelude Challenge 4

The Chairman is very taken with the idea of automation and deployment pipelines. He is intrigued by all of the options available to IT Pros and his Iron Scripters. To that end, he is proposing this warm-up challenge to continue preparing you for the Iron Scripter event at the upcoming PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit.

The Challenge

Using Azure, AWS or any virtualization technology you prefer, i.e. VMware or Hyper-V, create a PowerShell solution you can initiate from a PowerShell prompt to create and start a virtual machine that meets the following configuration criteria:

Requirements

• System event log size set to 2GB
• Create a folder called C:\Data with sub-folders of abbreviated month names
• Install the following Windows Features
  • Windows Server Backup
  • Telnet Client
  • FTP Server
  • Enhanced Storage
• Make sure the following Windows Features are NOT installed
  • SNMP
  • PowerShell v2
• Create a local administrator account for RoyGBiv with a decent password.
• Set the PowerShell Execution policy to RemoteSigned
• Add 172.16.100.* to TrustedHosts
• Install the PSScriptTools module from the PowerShell Gallery

Other than manually initiating the process, this should be a completely hands-free experience.

Comments

You don’t have to necessarily create the virtual machine entirely from scratch using PowerShell. It is perfectly acceptable to assume you have some sort of baseline server image that you can launch and configure. Using a container may be another option.

Good Automating!