Secure Server Access with Windows Defender Firewall

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Secure Server Access with Windows Defender Firewall

You are working on securing your Windows Servers, and as part of the effort, you want to configure a domain isolation policy between the employee workstations and the application servers. You want to make sure that the employees can only log into an application server from a domain-joined client workspace. In order to do this, in this hands-on lab, you are going to configure a Group Policy to enforce Windows Defender Firewall rules between client and server VMs.

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Lab Info

Level

Intermediate

Last updated

Sep 25, 2025

Duration

1h 15m

Challenge

Configure the Active Directory Domain Services Environment
- Install Active Directory Domain Services
  
  Download the installadds PowerShell script from the GitHub repository
- Create the Domain Admin user
  
  Download the domainadmin PowerShell script from the GitHub repository
- Create organizational units (OUs)
  
  Download the addou PowerShell script from the GitHub repository
- Join the client and server VMs to the domain and add them to their respective OUs
  
  Download the clientdomainjoin PowerShell script from the GitHub repository
  
  Download the serverdomainjoin PowerShell script from the GitHub repository
Challenge

Configure Group Policy for Windows Defender Firewall Rules
- Create a Group Policy Object and link it to the server organizational unit
  
  Edit the policy to Require authentication for inbound connections and request authentication for outbound connections to the server VM
- Create a Group Policy Object and link it to the client organizational unit
  
  Edit the policy to Request authentication for inbound and outbound connections to the client VM
- Update the Group Policies on the virtual machines
Challenge

Confirm Firewall Rules Have Been Applied
- Confirm that you can only directly remote into the client VM and not the server VM
- From the client VM, confirm that you can remote into the server VM using the private IP address or the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN)

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