Obtaining local and remote WMI objects

In the Exploring WMI classes recipe, you discovered that WMI provides a large number (over 100) of namespaces on each host along with thousands of WMI classes. You use the Get-CimInstance cmdlet to return the instances of a WMI class on either the local or a remote host, as you can see in the recipe. This cmdlet returns the WMI instances for a specified WMI class wrapped in a .NET object.

With WMI, you have three ways you can use Get-CimInstance:

• The first way is to use the cmdlet to return all class occurrences and return all class properties.
• The second way is to use the -Filter parameter to specify a WMI filter. The WMI filter instructs the Get-CimInstance command to return some, and not all, instances of the desired class.
• The third method uses a WMI query using the WMI Query Language (WQL). A WQL query is, in effect, a SQL statement that instructs WMI to return some (or all) properties of some (or all) occurrences...