Reference Guide

Introduction
5 Dell Agentless Client Manageability Technical Whitepaper | ID 413
1 Introduction
This whitepaper provides technical information on how customers can leverage “zero-touch” or agentless
management aspects of Dell
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commercial client platforms. The interface described in this whitepaper is
included on Dell commercial client systems released to market after calendar year 2018.
1.1 Background
Configuring Dell client systems without first installing a system management agent such as Dell Command
Suite agents can be challenging. These agents equip the system with proprietary interfaces, services, and
console UI- and CLI-based tools, but as soon as you introduce agent software into the equation, you also
need to develop and maintain update and redeployment plans. There is, however, another way to accomplish
a seamless, out-of-box experience without the need to install and maintain agents.
1.2 Windows Management Instrumentation & PowerShell
Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is the infrastructure for management data & operations on
Windows based operating systems. For more details on WMI see
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows/win32/wmisdk/wmi-start-page.
PowerShell is a cross-platform task automation and configuration management framework consisting of
command-line shell and scripting language. For more details see
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/powershell/scripting/overview?view=powershell-7
Most Dell commercial client systems are Windows-based, and IT administrators are not new to WMI and
PowerShell. These two technologies are built on industry standards, are simple. and enable scripting which
allows IT professionals to easily integrate them with their existing infrastructure or develop custom scripts
around these technologies. Microsoft has done a great job enhancing PowerShell capabilities to integrate and
manage WMI infrastructure in a seamless manner. This is why we chose this path to expose BIOS
configurable entities through WMI, and this technical whitepaper demonstrates sample scripts to configure the
same.
It is also worth mentioning that using this method to configure Dell business client systems is a uniform
common interface across multiple brands, including Latitude, Optiplex, Precision, and XPS laptops. It also
provides stable ways to enhance hardware management features and does not alter across various Windows
operating system versions.