Thursday, February 25, 2016

PowerShell 5.0 re-released. Do not install on Exchange!

Two weeks ago Microsoft decided to offer the latest version of .Net Framework as a recommended update. Many Exchange admins found out the hard way that it’s not wise to install every single update without checking if it is actually supported to run them in combination with Exchange. In case of .Net Framework 4.6.1 there were in fact known issues, as some people soon discovered.

Today Microsoft re-released Windows Management Framework (WMF) 5.0 RTM. WMF included PowerShell 5.0 which brings many new features. Advanced administrators are probably looking forward to install WMF 5.0 on all their systems as soon as possible. But don’t do that, not before you’re absolutely sure that it is supported with Exchange.

This information can be found in the Exchange Server Supportability Matrix, one of the most important Exchange resources that’s often overlooked. In the ESSM we find for instance that .Net Framework 4.6 is not supported:

image

And the same applies to WMF 5.0:

image

And for customers with Outlook 2007 who consider Exchange 2016:

image

By the way, it’s perfectly fine to use PowerShell (WMF) 5.0 to connect to Exchange Online. In fact, if you’re on the November update of Windows 10 (Version 1511) this means that PowerShell 5.0 is already installed on your system.

2 comments:

Bernd Webster said...

Seamed to be outdated, Microsoft updated the link you used and removed anything which was/is related to WMF 5 so it seamed to be supported.

Andrejs said...

Hi,

Not sure if the first comment did come through.

We have managed to deploy Exchange in a lab both manually and via DSC on 2012R2 with WMF 5.1.
I am not noticing any issues with Exch Shell and connection to the servers as well as executing basic commands in it.

The thing is that we wanted to deploy a few new servers via DSC, but I am not sure if there won't be any other surprises. Possibly you know some additional details or there are some issue notes documented with this?