Add Administrators to Multiple Servers Using PowerShell

How to add a user or group to the local administrators group on multiple Windows servers using a PowerShell script.  It's a common task, you build some new servers, and you have to add an Active Directory group to the local administrators group to grant administrative access to some groups.  Usually this is manually done by logging on to each server, opening Computer Management, and adding the group, one server at a time.  Brutal.

Why not do it with PowerShell?  It's not complicated.  We can use the ADSI provider for PowerShell to connect to the local security accounts manager on each server and add a member to the local Administrators group.

The script reads server names from a file, servers.txt.  For each server, it connects to the administrators group, and adds a member to it.  The script needs to be customized for your environment.  Simply replace myDomain with the name of your Active Directory domain, and replace myGroup with the name of the group you want to add.

$servers = Get-Content .\servers.txt
"Name`tStatus" | Out-File -FilePath .\results.txt
foreach ($server in $servers){
 try{
  $adminGroup = [ADSI]"WinNT://$server/Administrators"
  $adminGroup.add("WinNT://myDomain/myGroup")
  "$server`tSuccess"
  "$server`tSuccess" | Out-File -FilePath .\results.txt -Append
 }
 catch{
  "$server`t" + $_.Exception.Message.ToString().Split(":")[1].Replace("`n","")
  "$server`t" + $_.Exception.Message.ToString().Split(":")[1].Replace("`n","") | Out-File -FilePath .\results.txt -Append
 }
}

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