SSH Comes to Windows PowerShell

More than 50% Azure virtual machines run Linux. Developers and sysadmins who use Windows on their local machines need native UNIX tools to manage their workloads running in Azure cloud.

Microsoft has been working on a two-fold strategy to add those capabilities to Windows 10. One strategy is to integrate Linux applications with Windows 10 to bring those tools to Windows natively; the second strategy is to bake those capabilities in the PowerShell, the Windows command-line interface.

Today, Windows 10 users can easily ‘ssh’ into their remote Linux systems using a native Windows SSH client. Now it is possible to integrate that SSH support directly into PowerShell.

“PowerShell SSH lets you do a basic PowerShell session remotely between Windows and Linux machines. This is done by creating a PowerShell hosting process on the target machine as an SSH subsystem. Eventually this will be changed to a more general hosting model similar to how WinRM works in order to support endpoint configuration and JEA,” said the company in a blog post.

Integrating SSH with PowerShell will allow Windows users to operate within a more familiar command-line interface, and it will let admins incorporate SSH into PowerShell scripts. You'll need to install Win32 OpenSSH on the Windows client system. The target Linux system will need PowerShell for Linux in addition to the SSH service.

Microsoft has detailed instructions on how to use OpenSSH utilities with PowerShell.