I have no doubt in my mind that DSC is going to be a private/public cloud infrastructure designer’s best friend.
What makes DSC a necessity? Haven’t we been doing well so far? Steven Murawski does a far better job of explaining this (just gonna paraphrase here for a minute…)
“The reason DSC is important is because the more steps involving human interaction, allows for more potential failure points.”
So minimizing human interaction is essential to minimizing failure points. That’s always a good thing. The lesser the failure points the better the process. Makes sense.
Now Group Policy has been around for quite some time. When it comes to troubleshooting and editing, gpmc.msc is your go-to tool. With Group Policies its all about managing Domains. If you’re not part of a domain, well then you’re out of luck… that is until DSC.
Ok, I’m new to blogging game so I need to be careful posting information from other sources. The DSC Resource book at powershell.org explains the DSC vs GPO quite well. Have at it 🙂
My first thought on DSC in an environment using GPO’s is… Will they get in each others way? and if so who has the last say in the matter? Troubleshooting just got a whole lot complicated! All of a sudden, I’m starting to think about refresh intervals of both GPO & DSC and how or if I should think about manipulating them… What happens if my GPO settings resets my DSC settings? Or vice versa? This is madness!!! Ok Urv, take a deep breath… Whooozaaa…
I guess DSC isn’t going to replace GPO any time soon. I found a link from Darren Mar-Elia on the subject. He made some very valid points concerning the strength and weakness of both products. DSC is excellent as a configuration management platform for Windows Servers. DSC will also work for Workstation, but Servers are the obvious target here.
So let’s not abandon the old for the shiny just yet shall we? Remember “use the right tool for the right job”
I will say this in DSC’s defense, it got me thinking about the life cycle of resources. It’s one thing to have a resource in a desired state, disposing of them also needs to be handled properly.
I guess time will tell if DSC will be the ultimate configuration tool… Learning DSC will be a good investment, Microsoft is betting everything on it…
Ttyl,
Urv
pshirwin 