Windows Remote Management: Why is enabling this so tedious on Server 2012/2016? Am I doing it wrong?

Software & Operating Systems Windows
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I’m trying to setup a Sandbox environment for playing with Active Directory things for testing.

I’d like to have all servers virtualized and only one of them with a GUI for lower resource usage.

To make things easier, I’d rather the one server with a GUI be the one I manage the other servers from. I realize I could do the same from a Windows 10 machine with the Remote Management tools installed, but having a server available to do it with as well would be ideal.

My question is really: Is this how I’m supposed to be enabling this functionality on Server 2012/2016?

I’m finding that I have to do the following things to allow Remote Volume Management, as an example:

  1. Add Firewall exceptions for the Remote Volume Management inbound connections (RPC-EPMAMP and RPC) on the client.
  2. Do the same for the server managing the client.

There are firewall groups for these specific things. As an example:

Screenshot from 2017-12-12 13-21-17

But there isn’t one for all of them combined. Meaning I’d have to manually create firewall exceptions for each individual grouping on both the managing server and the managed server.

Then there’s the WinRM (WIndows Remote Management) console and I’m not even sure if that’s the same thing.

Screenshot from 2017-12-12 13-22-21

I assume it’s not.

I’ve elected to use Group Policy Objects so I can make this easier, but I’d like to make as few changes as possible to achieve what I want for security and management reasons.

My goal is to just go into the managing server with the GUI, go to All Servers (as it’s running Server 2012/2016), right click the server I want to manage, then go to Computer Management and make changes there.

Why isn’t this just one tick box? Why is enabling this kind of management so tedious? Is there an easier way? Am I overtaking the plumbing?

I understand atomizing it into individual things, but since they’re all so related in being aspects of Remote Management, I would expect a big “enable all of it” option.

Enabling Remote Management on the individual servers themselves, since that is an option, doesn’t do as I wish. For example:

Screenshot from 2017-12-12 13-28-48

Apparently it’s enabled, but this doesn’t let me Remote Volume Management. I had to specifically enable firewall rules for that on the Domain.

It’s all very unintuitive given that the options don’t enable the things I’d expect them to, and that there are multiple things that don’t seem to relate. i.e. Windows Remote Management VS the individual Remote Management options.

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Did you install the remote server administration feature?

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Uh, why isn’t that just built in?

Also @Vitalius I’m curious as to what this server is doing and why you’re using an NT based server unless its part of a workgroup.

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?

If I right click the server I wish to manage while on the server I’m using to manage it, then click “Add Roles and Features”, I see this feature list:

Screenshot from 2017-12-12 14-10-16

The feature immediately after that drop down is “RPC over HTTP Proxy”. There’s no “Remote Server Administration Feature” to install on the managed server.

If you mean to install that feature on the server doing managing, again, that feature doesn’t exist?

If you mean the individual tools themselves, I don’t see a tool specifically for managing Disks on another server, as an example. I have Server Manager. I go to All Servers. I right click the server I wish to manage. I click “Computer Management”. Disk Management is at the bottom. It doesn’t work unless I enable the firewall rules I setup.

You mean a Windows server? It’s a requirement.

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weird x3

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hmm. We actually don’t use the windows remote management stuff so this is something I’ve never goofed with, so I apologize. Something like that seemed like it would be as easy as installing a feature.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384372(v=vs.85).aspx

I’m sure you’ve read that but just wanted to link it to be sure. If I get a few minutes I’ll spin up a headless server and see if I can’t attach it to one of my servers.

Server comes pretty bare bones. You have to enable/install pretty much anything you need it to do… although in this case that was just ignorance on my part assuming it wasn’t installed by default.