Windows Remote Management (WinRM) is the Microsoft implementation of the WS-Management protocol, which is a standard Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)-based, firewall-friendly protocol that allows interoperation between hardware and operating systems from different vendors.

WinRM is ****a Windows remote management service that enables communication between computers on a network. WinRM is the underlying technology that enables remote management in PowerShell and other Windows administration tools.

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PowerShell Remoting Protocol it is a PowerShell-specific protocol built on top of WinRM to facilitate remote communication between instances of PowerShell on different computers. It adds PowerShell-specific functionality to remote communication, allowing users to execute PowerShell commands on remote computers and retrieve results. It utilizes WinRM as the underlying infrastructure for handling remote communication but adds the PowerShell context to enable the execution of PowerShell commands.

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How does WinRM work?

WinRM is a client-server protocol that uses HTTP or HTTPS for communication. The client, usually an administrator, initiates a connection to the server through a standard TCP port, 5985 (HTTP) or 5986 (HTTPS). The server then sends a response that includes a security token, which is used to authenticate the client. Once the authentication process is complete, the client can send commands to the server and receive responses from the server.

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How to enable

To enable WinRM from PowerShell, you can use the Enable-PSRemoting cmdlet. This cmdlet configures the computer to receive remote commands and allows PowerShell remoting:

Enable-PSRemoting -Force

Running this command will perform the following actions:

  1. Start the WinRM service (wsmprovhost and WinRM) if they are not already running.
  2. Set the WinRM service to start automatically at system startup.
  3. Configure the WinRM firewall exception to allow traffic on the default HTTP (5985) and HTTPS (5986) ports.
  4. Create a listener for WinRM over HTTP and/or HTTPS.

To verify if the WinRM is enabled on current machine:

Get-Service -Name WinRM
Test-WSMan -ComputerName localhost
winrm get winrm/config/service

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