I was recently asked to build a Powershell script to fully automate building up a server, including detailed configuration and installation of roles and other software.

Some of these actions required a reboot. After a reboot, the Powershell script had to restart itself. When running a script remotely, Workflows can be used, but when running the script locally I could not get this to work properly. Thus, I built a self-restarting script template that will run each phase as you configure it.

This self-resuming Powershell script writes its own run configuration to a Scheduled task that will run at boot time without user interaction, under the SYSTEM account. It will run all the commands you specify, reboot and resume when necessary, and unregister itself when it has completed.

This is awesome for, for example, building up Terminal Servers or Web Servers in a highly virtualized environment. Of course there are many orchestration tools available, and they may be better suited for this task, but those were not available when I was asked to code this.

Download it here: AutoBuilder_v0.3

Or check out the source code:

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