A very quick blog post today, seeing as though I have run this command on about 4 or 5 new servers I have deployed today. To allow a server to respond to incoming ICMP traffic (ping) you can issue the following command in the command prompt. Do this as an administrator of course!
netsh firewall set icmpsetting 8
Your machine should now respond to pings. You can also do this via the Windows firewall GUI but I find the command to be the quickest and easiest way of achieving this.
Keep in mind that by enabling ping reply on your servers, your servers could be subjected to DoS (deny of service) attack since flooding a server with a large number of ping requests is very easy to do. You should take additional steps to further lock down the scope by right click on the File and Printer Sharing (Echo Request – ICMPv4 In) rule and if possible, specify which servers/computers and/or IP range can ping your servers.