Monitor and Start Critical Services with PowerShell

We have multiple virtual machines running on a single Hyper-V host. Due to resource contention during startup, sometimes not all services start properly on one VM. To resolve this I created small PowerShell script that checks the status of some specific critical services and if they are stopped, starts them. I've scheduled the script to run hourly.

$services="MSExchangeADTopology","MSExchangeAntispamUpdate","MSExchangeEdgeSync","MSExchangeFDS","MSExchangeIS","MSExchangeMailboxAssistants","MSExchangeMailSubmission","MSExchangeSA","MSExchangeSearch","MSExchangeServiceHost","MSExchangeTransport","MSExchangeTransportLogSearch"

Foreach ($s in $services) {
    If ($s.status -ne "Running") {
        Start-Service $s
        }
    }

The $services variable contains the list of all the services names that are monitored. The script uses a foreach loop to examine the status of each service and start the service if the status is anything other than Running.