As a SharePoint Technology Architect you have to know a little bit of everything in the platform stack from Windows Server to Active Directory to DNS to networking, and much more, a veritable jack-of-all-platform-trades. On a recent project I was working with an IT Pro to prepare a new server virtual machine for a proof-of-technology for SharePoint 2016 when I was reminded of this.

This project teanm is hard up for infrastructure so we are scrounging for virtual machines and have to make do with a refurbished hand-me-down VM. The server team re-imaged the VM with Windows Server 2012 R2 as is required for SharePoint 2016. The initial sanity check of the refurbished VM is good, we can RDP to it and Server Manager Dashboard shows a healthy server, all services running normally.

Next  step is we have to request a DNS entry for the Central Admin site for SharePoint 2016, hence we need the IP address(es) of the new VM. As a quick step I ping the VM rather than RDP’ing to inspect its network adaptor configuration:

Whoa, ping does not respond! How can that be? I just RDP’ed to the server and it was fine.

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