Install RSAT for Windows 10

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Michael Pietroforte

Michael Pietroforte is the founder and editor in chief of 4sysops. He has more than 35 years of experience in IT management and system administration.

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RSAT for Windows is now available for download as 32-bit and 64-bit versions. I tried to manage a Windows Server 2012 R2 machine with a couple of the RSAT tools on a Windows 10 Enterprise computer and I didn’t encounter any problems. Server Manager worked as well.

You probably know that any Windows version requires its own RSAT version. Thus, you can’t install RSAT for Windows 8.1 on Windows 10. I have always wondered why because the tools are usually the same. Perhaps the reason is that RSAT comes as a Windows update, which I find odd too.

Installing RSAT for Windows 10

Even the Preview version of RSAT for Windows 10, which has been available for a while, did not work on the final release of Windows 10. If you installed RSAT’s Preview version, you should uninstall it before you install the new RSAT. To uninstall RSAT, type “installed updates” in the Control Panel and then search for the corresponding Update. The final release is named KB2693643. I am unsure if the Preview had the same KB number. If you upgraded Windows 10 Preview to the final version, RSAT Preview should have been uninstalled automatically.

You can only install RSAT on Windows 10 Professional and Windows 10 Enterprise. The tools don’t work on Windows 10 Home. If your Windows 10 installation uses a language other than English, you have to first install the English (United States) language pack. Localized versions of RSAT are currently not available. You will have to restart Windows after you install RSAT.

If you want to administer Windows Server 2012 and older Windows Server versions from a Windows Server 2012 R2 machine, you have to install Management Framework (WMF) 4.0. I have read reports that you have to install WMF 5.0 on the servers that you want to manage with RSAT for Windows 10. However, in my test, I hadn’t installed WMF 5.0 and I didn’t encounter any problems. WMF 5.0 is currently only available as Preview.

RSAT for Windows 10 - Windows features

In some previous versions of RSAT, you had to enable the tools in the Windows Features applet of the Control Panel. This is not required in RSAT for Windows 10. However, you can still disable some of the tools there if you only want to see what you actually use in Server Manager and in the Administrative Tools folder.

RSAT in Administrator Tools

If you never used RSAT before and wonder how you can run the tools, you just have to start typing “Administrative Tools” in the Start search box. For some reason (that I probably wouldn’t understand), you can’t search for the tool names in the fabulous Windows 10 Start menu. However, you can search and find the tools on the web this way, which is something.

Managing Windows Server 2012 R2 with RSAT for Windows 10

Most of the tools I tried (including Server Manager) worked well. However, I only tested them on Windows Server 2012 R2. If you ran into problems with some of the RSAT tools or with older Windows Server versions, please post a comment below. RSAT for Windows 10 should also work with the Preview of Windows Server 2016, but I didn’t try that.

For some reason, the DHCP tools and IP Address Management (IPAM) are not included in this release of RSAT, even though they appear in the list of Windows features. The Network Policy Server Tools can be started, but they don’t work. Some sites report that they will be removed from future RSAT versions. The Routing and Remote Access Tools cannot be used to manage remote computers.