Introduction

Desired State Configuration (DSC) is a management platform within Windows Server, and is implemented with Windows PowerShell. DSC enables you to define a computer's desired state declaratively and have PowerShell ensure that the computer is configured accordingly, and that it remains so. This is simpler than writing complex scripts to configure a particular computer.

With DSC, you define a configuration that describes the details of how a given node (computer) is to be configured. The configuration defines a series of resources to be invoked on the node and how these resources should be configured.

A DSC resource is a PowerShell module that is instructed to configure a given object residing on a node. If you are planning on using a specific DSC resource, you need the related PowerShell module on the computer on which you author the DSC configurations and on the target node.

As an example, you could define a node and specify that the WindowsFeature resource should be configured...