WMI associations through CIM cmdlets

The CIM cmdlets that introduced in PowerShell v3 give us a different API for working with WMI. We can still work with associations just in a slightly different way.

NOTE – this done on a different machine to the previous one so the adapters are different

We get the instances of a WMI class like this

Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_NetworkAdapter

we can filter to a specific instance

Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_NetworkAdapter -Filter "DeviceId=7"

if we put that in a variable

$nic = Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_NetworkAdapter -Filter "DeviceId=7"

then we can see all of the associated classes like this

Get-CimAssociatedInstance -CimInstance $nic

You might think that we would do this to get a specific associated class

Get-CimAssociatedInstance -CimInstance $nic -Association Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration

Nope – we don’t just to be different.

We need to back track a minute. When two classes are linked there is normally a linking class (reference) the shows the links. We can see this by running

Get-CimClass -ClassName *NetworkAdapter*

which shows a class Win32_NetworkAdapterSetting

so if we try

PS> Get-CimInstance -ClassName Win32_NetworkAdapterSetting

Element                                                     Setting
——-                                                     ——-
Win32_NetworkAdapter (DeviceID = "0")                       Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration (Index = 0)
Win32_NetworkAdapter (DeviceID = "1")                       Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration (Index = 1)
Win32_NetworkAdapter (DeviceID = "2")                       Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration (Index = 2)
Win32_NetworkAdapter (DeviceID = "3")                       Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration (Index = 3)
Win32_NetworkAdapter (DeviceID = "4")                       Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration (Index = 4)
Win32_NetworkAdapter (DeviceID = "5")                       Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration (Index = 5)
Win32_NetworkAdapter (DeviceID = "6")                       Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration (Index = 6)
Win32_NetworkAdapter (DeviceID = "7")                       Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration (Index = 7)
Win32_NetworkAdapter (DeviceID = "8")                       Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration (Index = 8)
Win32_NetworkAdapter (DeviceID = "9")                       Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration (Index = 9)
Win32_NetworkAdapter (DeviceID = "10")                      Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration (Index = 10)
Win32_NetworkAdapter (DeviceID = "11")                      Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration (Index = 11)
Win32_NetworkAdapter (DeviceID = "12")                      Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration (Index = 12)

Which is cool – we can see the links

A quicker way to discover this linking class is to do

Get-CimClass -ClassName *NetworkAdapter* -Qualifier "Association"

Now how do we use this link

Get-CimAssociatedInstance -CimInstance $nic -Association Win32_NetworkAdapterSetting

ServiceName      DHCPEnabled      Index       Description
———–      ———–      —–       ———–
netvsc           False            7           Microsoft Virtual Machine Bus …

which we know from the output above is the correct link

Same answer as WMI using a WQL query or GetRelated – just a different route