PowerShell Add-WindowsFeature unrecognized

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Thanks first of all for reviewing this.

I've basically got a third-party agent software which allows me to execute PowerShell as LocalSystem. This allows me to easily run remote PowerShell commands without WinRM etc.

The problem that i'm running into is that on some servers i'm not able to perform get-WindowsFeature or Add-WindowsFeature.

An example of how i'm trying to achieve this is here:

Import-Module ServerManager;
Get-WindowsFeature;

The output is as such:

The term 'Get-WindowsFeature' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.

If I type those same commands into a PowerShell window, or call PowerShell.exe directly, it returns. I'm trying to figure out what we're not doing right within the application, but i'm the most familiar person with PowerShell here.

Is there something special I need to do to load those cmdlets? Get-Module doesn't show anything, oddly.

Thank you!


In response to JBSmith:

Yessir - looks like 2.0. Here are the results of the commands you mentioned

>Name                           Value                                            
>----                           -----                                            
>CLRVersion                     2.0.50727.6407                                   
>BuildVersion                   6.1.7600.16385                                   
>PSVersion                      2.0                                              
>WSManStackVersion              2.0                                              
>PSCompatibleVersions           {1.0, 2.0}                                       
>SerializationVersion           1.1.0.1                                          
>PSRemotingProtocolVersion      2.1                                              
>
>Name : AppLocker
>Name : Appx
>Name : BestPractices
>Name : BitsTransfer
>Name : BranchCache
>Name : CimCmdlets
>Name : DirectAccessClientComponents
>Name : Dism
>Name : DnsClient
>Name : International
>Name : iSCSI
>Name : IscsiTarget
>Name : ISE
>Name : Kds
>Name : Microsoft.PowerShell.Diagnostics
>Name : Microsoft.PowerShell.Host
>Name : Microsoft.PowerShell.Management
>Name : Microsoft.PowerShell.Security
>Name : Microsoft.PowerShell.Utility
>Name : Microsoft.WSMan.Management
>Name : MMAgent
>Name : MsDtc
>Name : NetAdapter
>Name : NetConnection
>Name : NetLbfo
>Name : NetQos
>Name : NetSecurity
>Name : NetSwitchTeam
>Name : NetTCPIP
>Name : NetworkConnectivityStatus
>Name : NetworkTransition
>Name : MSFT_NfsMappedIdentity
>Name : NFS
>Name : PKI
>Name : PrintManagement
>Name : PSDiagnostics
>Name : PSScheduledJob
>Name : PSWorkflow
>Name : PSWorkflowUtility
>Name : RemoteDesktop
>Name : ScheduledTasks
>Name : SecureBoot
>Name : ServerCore
>Name : ServerManager
>Name : ServerManagerTasks
>Name : SmbShare
>Name : SmbWitness
>Name : Storage
>Name : TroubleshootingPack
>Name : TrustedPlatformModule
>Name : UserAccessLogging
>Name : VpnClient
>Name : Wdac
>Name : Whea
>Name : WindowsDeveloperLicense
>Name : WindowsErrorReporting
>Name : AWSPowerShell

I also noticed that GCM | ? { $_.ModuleName -eq 'ServerManager' } returns nothing when I run it through there, but through a normal PS window it returns a command list as expected.

6 Answers

On Windows Server 2016, while installing ADFS as a workaround I copied the C:\Windows\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Modules folders to C:\Users\vagrant\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Modules and it worked!

Get-WindowsFeature is no longer shipped with Windows or Windows Server and must be installed separately by installing the Windows Server Remote Administration Tools.

Here is the download link, this has downloads for Client and Server OS, so just chose the right package for your OS.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=45520

I had the same issue and my problem was that my PowerShell was running on 32 bit instead of 64 bit PowerShell

Running it on 64 bit PowerShell worked fine.

This is probably because the PowerShell script is being launched from a 32 bit instance of PowerShell. The ServerManager commands are only available from the 64 bit version of PowerShell.

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