WMF 4.0 & DSC on Vista? Any chance?

I am currently evaluating the Microsoft PowerShell Desired State Configuration feature.

Unfortunately, my company is still running more then 5000+ Vista clients (and W2003 servers), which seems like a big show stopper when it comes to WMF 4.0.

I am wondering if there is any way around it - some tricks, hacks, black magic - anything to get DSC running on Vista?

Solution 1:

Microsoft is pretty clear:

WMF 4.0 can only be installed on the following operating systems.

Windows 7 with Service Pack 1
Windows Server 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1
Windows Server 2012
**You cannot install this software on computers that are running Windows 8.**

Can't even install it on Windows 8.0, let alone Vista. So, your clients on Vista are stuck with WFM 3.0 and PowerShell v3, at most. I've found the use of PowerShell remoting and PowerShell 2 or 3 has been sufficient to manage our pre-7/2008 R2 machines, which is a good thing, because that's as good as it gets for those older operating systems, and as good as it's likely to ever get. WMF 4 support will likely never come to Vista and Server 2008, and will certainly never come to XP or 2003.

Solution 2:

The minimum requirements for Windows Management Framework 4.0 are Windows 7 SP1 and 2008 R2 SP1. The reason why it explicitly won't install on Windows 8, is because Windows 8.1 is a free upgrade to Windows 8, and everyone wants you to upgrade away from Windows 8 to 8.1.

Since this Q&A site is supposed to be about professional systems administration, I feel like we should probably not encourage people to "hack" or do "black magic" with their company's systems. You have 5000 Vista desktops, which is a significant asset. The thing about installing software on an unsupported OS is that Microsoft is free to change the software at any time and they are under no obligation to port that change back to older versions of Windows or make the change in a way that is compatible with older versions of Windows. So even if we found some "trick" to make WMF 4.0 work on Vista today, you might very well be back here in a couple months trying to figure out how to un-@#$% your 5000-machine Vista deployment because of the incompatible WMF 4.0 running on them.