Question

I’m trying to call Get-WMIObject (gwmi) on multiple computers selected via Get-ADComputer as a background job.

My first attempt was

$job = Get-ADComputer -filter "name -like '*t90*'" | % { gwmi -computername $_.name -query "select name,username from win32_computersystem" -asjob -throttlelimit 10 }

However, since I’m calling gwmi once for each computer object returned, hundreds of background jobs are created, and I don’t believe they’re collectively heeding the ThrottleLimit.

Am I doing this right?

I know that gwmi can also accept an array for the computername attribute, as so:

$job = gwmi -computername "computer1","computer2","computer3" -query "select * from win32_computersystem" -asjob -throttlelimit 10

Doing it this way results in a single job rather than hundreds, since gwmi is only called once. Is that the way I should be doing it? And, if so, how do I feed the output of Get-ADComputer to gwmi as an array?

Thanks!

Answer 1

First get all computer names and pass them to the computerName parameter:

$cn = Get-ADComputer -filter "name -like '*t90*'" | select -expand name
$job = gwmi -computername $cn -query "select name,username from win32_computersystem" -asjob -throttlelimit 10