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Ralph is responsible for the 24 servers running a particular application, which

ID: 3672581 • Letter: R

Question

Ralph is responsible for the 24 servers running a particular application, which are scattered all over his company’s enterprise network. Ralph wants to use Server Manager on his Windows 8 workstation to manage those servers and monitor the events that occur on them. To do this, he must enable the incoming COM+ Network Access and Remote Event Log Management rules in Windows Firewall on the servers.

Because he can’t travel to the locations of all the servers, and many of the sites do not have trustworthy IT personnel, Ralph has decided to use Group Policy to configure Windows Firewall on all of the servers. The company’s Active Directory Domain Services tree is organized geographically, which means that Ralph’s servers are located in many different OUs, all under one domain.

How can Ralph Use Group Policy to deploy the required Windows Firewall rule settings to his 24 servers, and only those servers?

Explanation / Answer

1.Windows Server 2012 R2 is designed to facilitate remote server management so administrators rarely if ever have to work directly at the server console. This conserves server resources that can better be devoted to applications.
2.When you add servers running Windows Server 2012 R2 to Server Manager, you can immediately begin using the Add Roles and Features Wizard to install roles and features on any of the servers you have added.
3.The Windows Firewall rules you have to enable for remote servers running Windows Server 2012 R2 are also disabled by default on computers running versions earlier than Windows Server 2012, so you also have to enable them there.
4.For administrators of enterprise networks, it might be necessary to add a large number of servers to Server Manager. To avoid having to work with a long scrolling list of servers, you can create server groups based on server locations, functions, or any other organizational paradigm.
5.You can manage remote servers from any computer running Windows Server 2012 R2; all the required tools are installed by default. However, the new administrative method that Microsoft is promoting urges administrators to keep servers locked away and use a workstation to manage servers from a remote location.