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Using WS-Management (WSMan) Remoting in PowerShell

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Enabling PowerShell remoting

To enable PowerShell remoting run the Enable-PSRemoting cmdlet in an elevated PowerShell session. Running Enable-PSRemoting configures a remoting endpoint for the specific installation version that you are running the cmdlet in. For example, when you run Enable-PSRemoting while running PowerShell 7.3, PowerShell creates a remoting endpoint runs PowerShell 7.3. If you run Enable-PSRemoting while running PowerShell 7-preview, PowerShell creates a remoting endpoint that runs PowerShell 7-preview. You can create multiple remoting endpoints for different versions of that run side-by-side.

Running Enable-PSRemoting creates two endpoints for that version.

  • One has a simple name corresponding to the PowerShell major version. that hosts the session. For example, PowerShell.7.3.
  • The other configuration name contains the full version number. For example, PowerShell.7.3.7.

You can connect to the latest version of PowerShell 7 host version using the simple name, PowerShell.7.3. You can connect to a specific version of PowerShell using the longer, version-specific name.

Use the ConfigurationName parameter with the New-PSSession and Enter-PSSession cmdlets to connect to a named configuration.

WSMan remoting isn't supported on non-Windows platforms

Since the release of PowerShell 6, support for remoting over WS-Management (WSMan) on non-Windows platforms has only been available to a limited set of Linux distributions. All versions of those distributions that supported WSMan are no longer supported by the Linux vendors that created them.

On non-Windows, WSMan relied on the Open Management Infrastructure (OMI) project, which no longer supports PowerShell remoting. The OMI WSMan client is dependent on OpenSSL 1.0. Most Linux distributions have moved to OpenSSL 2.0, which isn't backward-compatible. At this time, there is no supported distribution that has the dependencies needed for the OMI WSMan client to work.

The outdated libraries and supporting code have been removed for non-Windows platforms. WSMan-based remoting is still supported between Windows systems. Remoting over SSH is supported for all platforms. For more information, see PowerShell remoting over SSH.

Note

Users may be able to get WSMan remoting to work using the PSWSMan module. This module isn't supported or maintained by Microsoft.

Further reading