The following recipe will guide you through the steps required to deploy Gateway Management Servers for use with System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager.

Gateways are predominately used to provide communications between segments of networks that are not trusted or have bandwidth constraints.

Rather than employing clients with agents reporting directly across the network on mass to the main management servers, by implementing a gateway server, you provide a local point for the agents to report to that will then compress and forward the collected information back to the main management server. This allows for better control of network bandwidth usage and provides the ability to restrict communication to a single endpoint IP address and port while using certificates for authentication purposes, negating the need for cross-forest or domain trusts.