Continuing on the PowerShell them from my last post, I wanted to save some knowledge on working with DTC in PowerShell. I am not going to list every command, just what I’ve used recently to configure DTC. You can find more infomarion on MSDN, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh829474%28v=vs.85%29.aspx or TechNet, http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn464259.aspx.

View DTC Instances

Get-DTC will print a list of DTC instances on the machine.

PS> Get-Dtc

Stop and Start DTC

Stop

PS> Stop-Dtc -DtcName Local

Stopping DTC will abort all active transactions. So, you will get asked to confirm this action unless you turn off confirmation.

PS> Stop-Dtc -DtcName Local -Confirm:$False

Start

PS> Start-Dtc -DtcName Local

Status

You could use a script to confirm that DTC is started or stopped. When you call Get-Dtc and pass it an instance name it will return a property named “Status”. This property will tell you if the DTC instance is Started or Stopped.

PS> Get-Dtc -DtcName Local

Network Settings

You can view and adjust DTC Network Settings.

View

To veiw the network setting:

PS> Get-DtcNetworkSetting -DtcName Local

-DtcName is the name of the DTC instance.

Set

To set the network settings:

PS> Set-DtcNetworkSetting -DtcName Local -AuthenticationLevel Mutual -InboundTransactionsEnabled $True -LUTransactionsEnabled $True -OutboundTransactionsEnabled $True -RemoteAdministrationAccessEnabled $False -RemoteClientAccessEnabled $True -XATransactionsEnabled $False

Here we set the name of the instance to set values for then list the property value pairs we want to set. $True/$False are PowerShell parameters that return the boolean values for true or false respectively. If you try to run this set command, you will get a message asking if you want to stop DTC. I tried first stopping DTC then running this command and it still presented the confirmation message. You can add -Confirm:$False to turn off the confirmation message.

Conclusion

There is a lot more you can do, but this fits my automation needs. The only thing I couldn’t figure out is how to set the DTC Logon Account. There maybe a magical way of finding the registry keys and setting them or something, but I couldn’t find anything on it. If you know, please share…I’ll give you a cookie.

http://www.sqlha.com/2013/03/12/how-to-properly-configure-dtc-for-clustered-instances-of-sql-server-with-windows-server-2008-r2/ – Has some nice info on DTC and DTC in a clustered SQL Server environment. He even has a PowerShell script to automate configuration…Kudos. Sadly, his script doesn’t set Logon Account.