Install Windows Server 2008 R2 Features and Roles through Group Policy

Can I install windows built-in features and roles through group policy? If there is not a way to do this with group policy, is there some other method to this unattended to a bunch of servers that have already been deployed?

In this particular case I am interested in SNMP, but I will probably want to do this for other roles and features down the road.

From serverfault Kyle Brandt

• One way to do it would be using a startup script. Windows 2008 was designed to be maintained from the command line and has tools to add roles and features

  See: Installing Windows Features on a server running a Server Core installation of Windows Server 2008 R2

  I haven't tested, but it looks like the command you would need is Dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:SNMP.

  Theis page might be useful since it covers the registry settings you might want to make to configure it.

  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms907066.aspx

  tony roth : I've used dism a lot in this fashion, one of the cool thing is that it works in offline mode also, I use it against both offline vhd images and boot from san volumes. It would be nice to be able to do this via gpo's though!

  Kyle Brandt : Put this in a startup script. Also made a group policy for the community and allowed managers registry entries. Then after rebooting the servers I was able to run SNMP queries against them.
  From Zoredache

• You can add/remove roles via PowerShell cmdlet and command line - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732263.aspx.

  To do so via group policy use start up scripts.

  From edusysadmin