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.