New-SelfSignedCert unavailable on Windows 2008 R2 ==> WinRM not setup

[dusek]

I was debugging why vagrant reports that it is unable to connect through WinRM to the latest official image of Windows 2008 R2 (MicrosoftWindowsServer:WindowsServer:2008-R2-SP1-smalldisk:latest).

I discovered through WinRM e winrm/config/listener that no listener is configured (the output was empty).

Upon stepping through the steps of templates/arm/setup-winrm.ps1.erb in a PowerShell window on the machine (after connecting to it through RDP with an RDP file downloaded from Azure Portal), I discovered that running the (New-SelfSignedCertificate -CertstoreLocation Cert:/LocalMachine/My -DnsName $hostname).Thumbprint command failed with the message that the command New-SelfSignedCertificate is simply not known.

I then found on the internet that New-SelfSignedCertificate is probably unavailable on Windows Server 2008 R2, and that one should instead use MakeCert on such systems (which is now deprecated on the newer ones).