New things are not always good things or at least old habits change. I had been working on some runbooks in Orchestrator 2012 SP1 and needed to run PowerShell 3.0 and the .Net Activity.
I installed Orchestrator 2012 SP1 on Windows Server2008 R2 which has PowerShell 2.0 installed natively. Then I wanted to use the Get-SCXAgent cmdlet and hit an error:
As I am a good person I installed PowerShell 3.0 and started to build the runbook. Well, somehow I didn’t get the result I expected in my output. Next, I started digging around to see what’s wrong. If I executed the command in a regular shell (PowerShell 3.0) everything worked fine. I came across a post from Karl Prosser where he describes the problem.
Orchestrator executes it’s command still in PowerShel 2.0 instead PowerShell 3.0 if you use the Run .Net Activity. Because I wanted to see if this in Orchestrator SP1 still is an issue I build an easy runbook.
The first activity has two lines of code…
The second activity just dumps the results into a text file…
The first command is executed in a regular shell and the second command is executed in a sub shell . As the result shows, if you run regular PowerShell commands you will have a 2.o environment.
In order to have a PowerShell 3.0 environment for your Run .Net Script activity you need to call the script in a sub process and you can do that by executing the command like this…
$result = PowerShell { [Command]}
like
$PSEnv3 = PowerShell{$Host.Version}
Well, this issue is not brand new but still in Orchestrator SP1 something to be aware of.
Hi, and how can I get a variable result out of this shell in the shell?
Hi
I have not tried it but you also could try to add
Powershell -Version 3
at the beginnig of your script. This will load PowerShell 3.0 inside the current shell.
Cheers,
Stefan
Hi, thanks for help but unforgently it did not work 🙁 I have heared that powershell 3.0 activity is in the new azure ip. Could not verify, thank you and kind regards
Thats the fourth Blog article i find regarding this issue.
Everytime i use the $Var = powershell{Code} – trick, the runbooks hangs and never Exits.
Im running Orchestrator 2012 R2 on Windows Server 2012 R2.
Can someone confirm?
I’m getting a Little bit tired that with every release the rules are changing for calling scripts in Orchestrator..
What exactly are you trying to run on powershell 3? I use it for some stuff and it works for me.
the same for me when i try to run the exchange snapin it never exit.
Bump! I also have the same issue.
Running the script in Exchange Management Shell works fine. But not from within Orchestrator.
Has anyone come up with a solution for this?
When I tried this my RB was also hanging. After some tinkering around I found it was a bad character that was causing the v3 powershell to hang. We were using a music symbol for a delimiter. Once I replaced that with a more common character the RB finished just fine. This was the error that occurred:
powershell : Cannot process xml from ‘Output’ stream of ‘C:WindowsSystem32WindowsPowerShellv1.0powershell.exe’: ‘♫
‘, hexadecimal value 0x0E, is an invalid character. Line 1, position 103.
Hope that helps.
Thanks Stefan. I like to use Invoke-Command to make sure PowerShell runs in the latest version from Orchestrator and ended up creating a template for this after using it often. It also provides a way to get the variables back as published data. Feel free to download: https://automys.com/library/asset/powershell-system-center-orchestrator-practice-template
Hi,
Thanks!
Cheers,
Stefan
This post discribes how to run the .Net Scipts always with the latest Version, with help of this reg key I was able to use the new -In and -NotIn Operators of Powershell 3. http://www.sc-orchestrator.eu/index.php/scoblog/128-run-the-powershell-version-of-windows-executing-the-orchestrator-runbook-service-in-run-net-script-activity
Greetings
Marc
It is tempting to try the registry trick, but it may have unintended consequences.
See: https://connect.microsoft.com/PowerShell/feedback/details/525435/net-4-0-assemblies-and-powershell-v2
“While it is possible to force PowerShell 2.0 to run with .NET Framework 4.0 using various mechanisms such as creating a config file for PowerShell or editing the registry, these mechanisms aren’t supported and can have negative side effects on other PowerShell functionality such as PowerShell remoting and cmdlets with mixed-mode assemblies.”
I’m calling another PowerShell script inside a Run .NET activity. via dot sourcing. How can I make use of PowerShell { }? It doesn’t work for me, it complains
The expression after ‘.’ in a pipeline element produced an invalid object. It must result in a command name, script block or CommandInfo object.