Desired State Configuration - Elements of the configuration

DSC is a feature built into the Windows Operating System. It’s based on the standards like CIMS and WS-Management remote management offered by the operating system. With DSC you can move to a way of configuration management where you can create a script that defines how the state of the server should be instead of defining how to make the server in the desired state. That means, DSC is more of a declarative syntax than an imperative one. This makes DSC scripts/ configurations easy to understand and maintain by the operations.

A sample DSC configuration for configuring the web applications in a SharePoint farm looks like:

Configuration SPSiteCollectionConfig {

    param($nodes)

    Import-DscResource -ModuleName xDSC_SPSiteCollection

    Import-DscResource -ModuleName xDSC_SPWebApplication

    Node ($nodes) {

        xSPWebApplication WebApplication{

            WebApplication = "WebApplication MYWebApp"

            Ensure = "On"

        }

       

        SPSiteCollection SiteCollection {           

            SiteUrl = 'http://MYWEBAPP.com/newSite'

            SiteName = 'New Site'

            SiteTemplate = 'BLANKINTERNET#2'

            ContentDatabaseName = 'CONTENT_NEWSite'

            Language = '1033'

            Ensure = 'Present'

            DependsOn = "[xSPWebApplication]WebApplication" 

        }

    }

}

SPSiteCollectionConfig

The  Configuration script start with a Configuration block which is used to give the configuration a meaningful name. The configuration keyword is the core component of DSC that defines the desired configuration of a target system. Following the Configuration keyword, the Node keyword is used to specify the target system/ systems on which the configuration should be applied by the LCM. You can also parameterize the values that are passed to the Node keyword if you want to decide the target systems at a later point of time. Later you can pass the target systems values to the configuration when you want to create a MOF file out of the configuration created.

Within the node is a state of a DSC Resource. The DSC resource module is what takes care of the how part of the configuration management. The DSC resource modules are implemented or written in imperative style, which means the resource module implements all the necessary details to manage the configuration settings of an entity. However, the DSC configuration makes it possible to abstract those imperative details from the end user, using a declarative configuration script.

We now have to translate that into a format that the DSC Local Configuration Manager or the DSC Engine can understand. This is the Managed Object Format (MOF) representation of the configuration script. We can generate the MOF representation of the configuration script by simply loading the configuration into memory and then calling the configuration. 

In our example we added the name of the configuration at the end of the script. This will ensure that the script when executed will generate the MOF files for each node and store it in the folder that has the same name as the configuration.

Once you have the MOF files generated you can execute them using the PUSH mode by calling the Start-DSCConfiguration cmdlet