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Apologies for the noob question regarding Windows and VSphere. I am looking to solve a problem in my current organization where we never seem to know the current state of our servers due to too many people being able to log in and make changes. While I want to move us to something like DSC (and ultimately will), I am just trying to see if there are tools that will tell me the current state of any of my machines so I can compare them.

Example information that I would like to see reported would be:

  • OS Version (this one is easy but included for completeness)
  • Services installed and versions
  • Frameworks/SDK's installed (e.g. .net, java, and go versions)
  • User folder structures (to see if the same folders exist on both servers)
  • IIS state (services, routing, etc.)

I'm fairly new to this space, especially for windows servers, and would appreciate any help or direction.

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    Those are all Windows-specific configs; the underlying hypervisor is not relevant and can't possibly know such details about its guests.
    – Massimo
    Nov 21, 2022 at 18:21
  • Understood. I was really including the hypervisor we use as additional context.
    – RockyMountainHigh
    Nov 21, 2022 at 19:41

2 Answers 2

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There isn't a great single solution for this. Your instinct is correct, to get to a place of using config management to define what a new server should look like, but expecially on Windows it's really tough to get "current state" or "Drift detection".

For OS version and installed software, any off-the-shelf inventory software for Windows will be able to gather this info easily.

Your best path forward for checking on folder absence/existence would be to write some scripts to gather this info yourself and store it in a way that works for you (database, TXT files, depends on how you're going to use it)

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  • Thank you @mfinni! I was afraid that there might not be a single answer. I'm ok with any answer that is tenable. I believe that we can gather the information we need with the exception of the file/folder structure and figured I could likely script something to do effectively a tree cmd and store it off into a file or db.
    – RockyMountainHigh
    Nov 29, 2022 at 20:46
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Consider implementing a Change Control process at your company so that changes to systems are logged/approved ahead of time and leave a searchable historical record.

Also enable audit logging to a centralized system so that you have a way to search for who made changes to a server after the fact.

If a person is found to be making changes to a server without an approved Change Request then that's something for their manager to deal with.

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  • Absolutely! We have change control but what happens is we get into a firefighting mode and people are all trying to be helpful and fix the problem but do not go through the proper process in the interest of speed. Thank you for the response!
    – RockyMountainHigh
    Nov 29, 2022 at 20:47

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