Windows Server 2022

Objectives:

• To have a Windows Server with RDP exposed to the internet

Go to cloud.google.com and login. Navigate to our SOC-Monitoring project.

Steps to create the Windows Server

• Go to Compute Engine > VM Instances > Create Instance.
• Name the instance (e.g. windows-server)
• Choose Region: Pick a region. Preferably the same region on which our ELK server resides to avoid regional accessibility issues (I choose asia-east1 region and asia-east1-a zone)
• Machine configuration: Select a machine type which won’t incur much cost (e.g., e2-medium with 2 vCPU and 4GB RAM).
• OS and Storage: Choose Windows Server 2022 Datacenter as operating system with enough disk space (I chose a 60 GB SSD disk). (Full account activation is required to use Windows images in Google Compute Engine)
• Networking: I’m not adding any additional firewall rules from here. No network tags as well. Under network interface let’s choose our VPC vpc-test-machines and select subnet vpc-test-machines-internal. Let’s choose a custom IP address (I choose 192.168.0.2. We cannot use 192.168.0.1 for our machines as it is already reserved for the gateway). I’ll leave the external IP address as Ephemeral.
• Click Create to start our Windows server instance

My Windows instance config

Configuration	Value
Instance Name	windows-server
Region	asia-east1
Zone	asia-east1-a
Machine Type	e2-medium (2 vCPUs, 4 GB RAM)
Operating System	Windows Server 2022 Datacenter
Storage	60 GB SSD
Network	vpc-test-machines
Subnet	vpc-test-machines-internal, range 192.168.0.0/24
Internal IP	192.168.0.2
External IP	Ephemeral
Firewall Rules	As configured for the network
Network Tags	None

Navigate to:

VM instances > Choose our machine > Under Network interfaces > Network details > Click view details

Here we can check and make sure that our machine firewall rules are set properly and accepts RDP traffic from all over the internet.

To set up credentials for RDP connection into this machine, choose our machine instance again and Click Set Windows Password. It will allow us to set an username and it will generate a password for us. Let’s save the credentials somewhere to be used whenever necessary.

If we now use Remote Desktop Connection from our local windows machine (or we can also use third part clients), put in the public IP for our windows-server machine, and use the credentials we have generated, we’ll be able to access our windows server machine.

We have SUCCESSFULLY set up our Windows server 2022 with RDP exposed to the internet