RSAT Tools: Where Art thou?

The other day at work I need to access the AD & check some of the DFS’s from my region. However my RSAT tools where gone! RSAT Tools: Where Art thou? :O

And it was at this moment that I realized that I recently had an update towards Win10 21H2 release… So this basically meant that I had to reinstall the RSAT tools yet again. This is not an issue at all but for sure it came on a unhappy moment… 😉

What is RSAT Tools?

RSAT stands for Remote Server Administration Tools and is an essential tool which you should have installed on your latop when you’re managing Servers. This tool basically allows you to remotely manage roles and features on Windows Server hosts from your laptop. It includes both graphical MMC snap-ins, command-line tools AND PowerShell Modules. RSAT can be installed on any Windows 10 as well as on your Windows Servers hosts. RSAT includes the below moduels.

• RSAT: Active Directory Domain Services and Lightweight Directory Services Tools
• RSAT: BitLocker Drive Encryption Administration Utilities
• RSAT: Active Directory Certificate Services Tools
• RSAT: DHCP Server Tools (used to configure and manage DHCP server on Windows Server)
• RSAT: DNS Server Tools
• RSAT: Failover Clustering Tools
• RSAT: File Services Tools
• RSAT: Group Policy Management Tools
• RSAT: IP Address Management (IPAM) Client
• RSAT: Data Center Bridging LLDP Tools
• RSAT: Network Controller Management Tools
• RSAT: Network Load Balancing Tools
• RSAT: Remote Access Management Tools
• RSAT: Remote Desktop Services Tools
• RSAT: Server Manager
• RSAT: Shielded VM Tools
• RSAT: Storage Migration Service Management Tools
• RSAT: Storage Replica Module for Windows PowerShell
• RSAT: System Insights Module for Windows PowerShell
• RSAT: Volume Activation Tools (KMS server console)
• RSAT: Windows Server Update Services Tools.

Some time ago RSAT was included as feature pack within Windows but Microsoft stopped doing that. So this needs to be installed manually. There are actually two ways of installing them but I prefer the easy way: PowerShell commands.

How to install RSAT Tools?

First open PowerShell with Admin rights & run the below command. This command will present you all of the above mentioned RSAT tools, there current state (if they’re Present (installed) or not, Display name, Description , Download size etc.

Get-WindowsCapability -Name RSAT* -Online

Now, copy the name of the RSAT module which you would like to install and run the command. In the below case the RSAT module for Active Directory Domain Services and Lightweight Directory Services Tools will be installed and that’s it.

Add-WindowsCapability –online –Name Rsat.ActiveDirectory.DS-LDS.Tools~~~~0.0.1.0

After the installation you’ll get a loading bar as you can see here below.

And as soon as the module has been downloaded and installed, PowerShell will also give you a heads-up about this. Pay attention to RestartNeeded. If this is set on True, then reboot in order to see the RSAT tools.

Now you can continue and do your work as needed or continue installing more tools as needed.

How to check which RSAT Tools are installed?

By running the below command in PowerShell with Admin rights you’ll get a list of all RSAT tools which are installed on your device.

Get-WindowsCapability -Name RSAT* -Online | Select-Object -Property DisplayName, State

This will give you a list of all the RSAT tools which are currently running on your system.

How to remove a specific RSAT tool if you don’t need it any longer?

That can be accomplished with a simple PowerShell command as well. Note that you need to start PowerShell with Admin rights. Simply type the below command and replace the Rsat.ActiveDirectory.DS-LDS.Tools~~~~0.0.1.0 with the actual name of the RSAT tool which you want to remove. Again PowerShell will provide you with the loading bar followed by its results. This is the same as for the installation part.

Remove-WindowsCapability -Online -Name Rsat.ActiveDirectory.DS-LDS.Tools~~~~0.0.1.0

To wrap up:

RSAT tools are very handy to do you work as System Admin as fast and as productive as possible and it’s a must to have installed. With this post I for sure hope that it will help you understand what it is, how you can add and remove RSAT tool with a simple command!