Re:I'll bite (Score 1)

* And anything else you want to add support for yourself-- I note that Hadoop for example has community support for powershell

By support, I dont mean in the sense that you could use bash to launch SSH to manage these things. I mean in the sense that VMWare allows you to run the following native powershell commands: Connect-VIServer myVMCluster Get-VM | Where-object {$_.powerState -eq "PoweredOn"} | foreach { stop-VM $_}

And all of your VMs will be shut off. Trying to do something like that in bash is doable, it just requires screwing around with scripted SSH access to the VMhosts which is painful, for anyone who has done it.

That's assuming that you haven't put your ESX hosts in lockdown mode or disabled SSH access, which is obviously a security best practice. If you have done these things then you can't script the actions without PowerShell.

And it's not just VMware, either. How do you manage directory services? How do you manage storage? How do you manage networking? More importantly, how do you do it remotely and at enterprise scale? Most of the major hardware vendors out there now have PowerShell modules for managing their products, because it is quickly becoming the de facto method of managing systems for companies that use Windows server. I get that Slashdot has a fairly strong pro-linux/anti-Microsoft bias, but unless you are one of the few that live in a 100% linux/Unix world then PowerShell is the way forward.

For anyone who has any sort of legitimate interest in learning what PowerShell is intended to be, take a few minutes to look over the Monad Manifesto. It was written by Jeffrey Snover, the "father of PowerShell". He's not some pro-Windows shill that just popped up at Microsoft, his pedigree goes all the way back to DEC and before.