WMI Filter Features on Demand GPO

Last week, Yung Chou from Microsoft put up a post about using Group Policy to provide Features on Demand for Windows Server 2012 R2 and how this can help in restricted environments where servers don’t have access to Windows Update to retrieve on-demand features such as .NET Framework 3.5 or where you don’t want to be left manually providing UNC paths to operating system media.

This is certainly true, and even if you aren’t in a restricted environment this is worthy of doing because it makes it much easier for administrators to add certain roles and features to Windows Server however the one point that was missed from the post is that you will probably want to WMI Filter this Group Policy Object so that only Windows Server 2012 R2 operating systems will be able to read it and apply the policy setting.

I’m not going to walk through the process of creating a WMI Filter and applying it to a GPO as that’s pretty simple stuff but finding the right query to craft can sometimes be a challenge so here you go:

SELECT ProductType, Version FROM Win32_OperatingSystem WHERE (Version LIKE "6.3%") AND (ProductType = "2" OR ProductType = "3")

This query will pick out Windows Server 2012 R2 with the Version LIKE 6.3% syntax however this alone would also resolve true on Windows 8.1 client machines so the addition of ProductType equals 2 or 3 means that only server types will be matched.

This filter can be used for targeting any GPO that requires Windows Server 2012 R2 specifically. If you wanted to craft a WMI Filter which explicitly calls out Windows 8.1 instead then simply replace ProductType 2 or 3 with ProductType equals 1.