Cloud Fundamentals & Active Directory

As part of the risual education infrastructure technician portfolio, we as Microsoft Certified Trainers must provide technical training in several IT-related qualifications. One of these is Microsoft Cloud Fundamentals.

As part of this, several learners during class had said that they use Active Directory but a lot of them were not particularly confident with it and a significant majority had never set it up nor used it alongside Microsoft Azure – it had all been on-premise and this got me thinking, could I demonstrate how I’ve set up Active Directory in class? I went away and decided to teach myself a good process and document it to follow as a class.

Firstly, I decided I should purchase a domain. I had a look online at several domain registrars, and I decided to buy aglearning.co.uk. I then setup an Azure tenant and an Office 365 subscription and imported the relevant DNS record for my domain into Office 365 to prove that I have ownership of this domain and to make the domain verified in Microsoft Azure. Once I had done this, I signed back into my Azure tenant and I set up a new dashboard called AG AD Test. I then created a resource group called AGResourceGroup1. I then created a virtual network where my domain service will reside in. I created a subnet where my VMs will reside in and a second subnet where my domain services would reside in. I then created a new user called AGUser1 in the Azure portal. I then went to create a resource and selected Azure AD Domain Services and configured it with relevant networking settings and waited for it to deploy. I then set up a virtual machine to add to my domain later. After Azure AD Domain Services deployed, I set up my DNS entries. I then back to the AGUser1 account and changed the password so it would sync over to the domain. I then went to my virtual machine and connected to it using the remote desktop connection and signed in using the default local administrator account.

As it was running Windows Server 2016, I opened the server manager and navigated to the ‘local server’ tab. Once I’d done this, I’d selected “workgroup” and selected domain so I could join it to the domain. I got an error saying that the domain could not be contacted, and it failed. I restarted the virtual machine. I then repeated this process and it asked me for a domain administrator account which I used to join the virtual machine to the aglearning.co.uk domain.

I was able to also install Active Directory Domain Services and promote the server to a domain controller, where I could then control user accounts through Active Directory Users and Computers.

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