a little powershell will do me good

I had an issue today and needed to report versions of OS and SQL Server for a few machines to support. I was unsure of the OS versions of these machines. After asking my team for any documentation on said machines or what versions the OS was currently, I thought... Powershell can probably do this for me. Whip out my google-fu and a few minutes later I have a small working script I can execute against a box to determine the pieces of information I desired.

Simple.

get-wmiobject Win32_OperatingSystem -comp Server1 '

| select __Server,Caption,ServicePackMajorVersion

get-wmiobject Win32_OperatingSystem -comp Server2 '

| select __Server,Caption,ServicePackMajorVersion

Here is a sample of the Powershell script I used. It returns 3 columns. The Server Name, the OS version and the Service Pack. Simple little table of information.

Obviously you could add to this script to perform a loop from a list of servers. You could augment this to do many things. But for me, it was a simple solution to determining what the OS version was so that I could report this to the support staff I was dealing with. And whats better, I didn't have to bother any other humans for the needed information.