How to enable Flash Player on Windows Server 2012 r2

If you are trying to view web pages that contain flash content on Windows Server 2012 r2 then you may find that it does not work. You are then led to a page on the Adobe website tells you that Flash player is already installed on Windows 8 and that you do not need to install it. This post explains how to enable Flash Player on Windows Server 2012.

The page then goes on to provide instructions as to how to enable Flash, this basically consists of:

Ensuring that the flash player add-on is enabled.
Checking that Active-X filtering is disabled.

You will probably find that these instructions do not work for you as flash player is not listed in the Internet Explorer Add-ons.

How to install Flash Player on Windows Server 2012 r2

In order to install Flash Player on Windows Server 2012 you need to install the Desktop Experience Feature. To do this, do the following:

Go into server manager.
Click add roles and features:
Press next until you reach the “Features” page.
Tick the box “Desktop Experience” which is hidden under the “User Interfaces and Infrastructure” feature:
You will then have to accept the installation of some other features to support the installation of desktop experience
The features are installed and the server is rebooted:

Or if you prefer, you can install with the simple but so effective Windows Powershell command:

Install-WindowsFeature Desktop-Experience

The reason I wanted to have access to Flash Player on this particular server was so that I could access the vSphere Web client, which uses flash. Hope this helps someone.

If you are looking for instructions on how to Install Flash Player on Windows Server 2016 – please follow this updated guide.

38 thoughts on “How to enable Flash Player on Windows Server 2012 r2”

Thanks for sharing. Helped me out today 🙂

Yeah. That helped. A LOT. Thank-you for taking the time to make this page and for giving such a simple walkthrough, whereas Microsoft wouldn’t provide this info. Funny how they view Flash as a security concern and make it hard to enable when so many commercial interfaces for enterprise software require it.

It really works. I was struggling with it for an hour and tried the steps listed here and it works!!

Thank you so much for sharing..

Thank you

Thanks for the post. Saved me a lot time.

Thank you

Cheers Bud

There is a better, faster way. That doesn’t require a reboot. Install another browser (chrome, or firefox)

THANK YOU FOR SHARING.
I wished i found your website first

Thank you so much. I had the same problem, could not access vsphere web client because of flash. This is what I needed.

Also, after you do the reboot, if it’s still not working for you, make sure you don’t have ActiveX filtering turned ON. It’s in IE under Tools > ActiveX Filtering

Much appreciated, also needed this for vSphere

THIS HELPED ME VERY MUCH THANK YOU

Fab. I searched the whole internet and finally found this useful article.
Kudos to you. Me too want to access vSphere Web client using IE

Thank you for your help

Thanks a lot. Very helpful.

Great job on the post. Effective, short, and to the point. Thanks.

I just wanted to thank you for the very good information you provided. On server it always said to just enable but that never worked. Which means it was misleading. Thanks for your incredibly helpful instructions!

Thank you

Already have Desktop Experienced feature and still unable to use flash.

Thanks very much! You are the men! it took me half day to fix this

I am having issues installing the feature , it keeps failing . want to install it on Windows 2012 R box, help please

2 and a half later and this still helped me. Thanks muh dood.

Thanks, It helped a lot I was struggling from one hour to get the flash player installed.

Hey man, thanks for that! Had me stumped for a little while but handy to know! I had to do the same thing, install Flash on a Management Jump Host to access VMware Web Client.