Obtaining WMI Class Instances

In the Exploring WMI Classes recipe, you discovered that WMI provides many (over 100) namespaces on each host and thousands of WMI classes. You use the Get-CimInstance cmdlet to return the instances of a WMI class. These classes can reside 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 in which you can use Get-CimInstance:

• The first way is to use the cmdlet to return all class occurrences and properties.
• The second way is to use the -Filter parameter to specify a WMI filter. When used with Get-CimInstance, the WMI filter instructs the command to filter and return some 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...