The following article is part 3 of our many-part series, “Hybrid Cloud for IT Pros”. Click HERE often for the ever-growing full list of articles in this series.
“Hey Kevin, I’d like to take advantage of putting application servers up in a virtual network in Azure. But I need a domain controller for my application to work. Can I put one in my virtual network?”
Absolutely! There’s no reason you can’t build a server, install AD Domain Services, and have it either as the new domain controller in a new forest, or as another domain controller in an existing forest – provided you can get to the other domain controllers through Site-to-Site VPN Gateway or ExpressRoute.
As a matter of fact, in our current set of content for our US DX IT Camps happening across the country, our Hands-on-Labs have our guests using their own (or a trial) Azure subscription to create a network and then populate it with a Domain Controller (among other machines). If you want to try out just building a Domain Controller on a virtual network in Azure, I suggest you run through at least the first two of our labs:
- Lab 1 – Building the Foundation (Virtual Network, Storage, and Cloud Service)
- Lab 2 – Building Workloads (Creating your DC and SQL Servers)
- Lab 3 – Working with Identity (Sync your domain to Azure AD, setup and test Multi-Factor Authentication)
- Lab 4 – Building Application and SQL Workloads (Install the Web server. Configure your SQL Server database and connectivity from your Web Server)
- Lab 5 – Building Application Workloads (Install, configure, and a sample web application)
- Lab Appendix (Installing AD by running a script on DC01, and installing Azure PowerShell Cmdlets)
If you don’t already have an Azure subscription, sign up for a FREE TRIAL HERE and give the labs a try.
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Finding our series useful? I hope so! Feel free to share or ask anything you’d like in the comments.