Windows Server 2012 – Identifying Server Core

windows-server-2012windows-server-corewmi

I want to detect if a 2012 server is has been setup as a Core install using WMI. An earlier question, would seem to indicate that I can get the OperatingSystemSKU from Win32_OperatingSystem. My Windows 2012 Core systems are reporting a OperatingSystemSKU of 7. The article from the other question would seem to indicate is a PRODUCT_STANDARD_SERVER, and if had a core install I should expect to see a value of 0x0000000D instead for PRODUCT_STANDARD_SERVER_CORE.

What am I missing here. I eventually want to create a policy and use item level targeting to only apply that policy to Windows 2012 Server Core installs.

PS C:\Users\zoredache\Documents> gwmi -Query "select OPeratingSystemSKU,Version,ProductType from Win32_OperatingSystem"

__GENUS            : 2
__CLASS            : Win32_OperatingSystem
__SUPERCLASS       :
__DYNASTY          :
__RELPATH          : Win32_OperatingSystem=@
__PROPERTY_COUNT   : 3
__DERIVATION       : {}
__SERVER           :
__NAMESPACE        :
__PATH             :
OperatingSystemSKU : 7
ProductType        : 2
Version            : 6.2.9200

Best Answer

In PowerShell:

Get-WMIObject Win32_OptionalFeature | where Name -eq 'Server-Gui-Shell' | Select InstallState

returns 1 on a full server and 2 on a server core install.

Edit:

While my answer above is correct, there are two problems with it:

  1. When using this command on a workstation, it returns nothing, so you have to add an extra check for this.

  2. It is slow, when I tried it, it took between 600 and 3500 milliseconds.

So the more pragmatic approach is to just check for the existence of a certain file:

(Test-Path "$env:windir\explorer.exe")

This returns $false for a Server Core installations and $true for all others and it takes one millisecond to execute.

Related Topic