Microsoft recently announced the public preview of Azure Active Directory(AD) Domain Services support for virtual networks deployed through Azure Resource Manager.
This will give customers the ability to create new managed AD domains in the virtual networks that are provisioned by Azure Resource Manager, making Azure AD Domain Services deployment much easier.
Azure AD Domain Services provide managed AD domains services like group policy, domain join, LDAP, and Kerberos authentication.
Azure Resource Manager is Microsoft’s tool that facilitates deployment of complex application workloads having dependencies on cloud-resources like virtual machines, virtual networks and storage. The resources needed by these applications are logically assigned into the resource groups with the help of templates.
“This new public preview lets you create a managed AD domain in a resource manager virtual network from the Azure portal,” per the announcement.
For those getting started with the preview, they need to create a new managed AD domain with the help of Azure Portal, if Azure AD Domain Services is not enabled for their Azure directory. They need to select ‘Resource Manager’ as the virtual network type.
If Azure AD domain services is already enabled in classic virtual network in the production instance, then they will not be able to utilize this preview. However, the company is working on a migration feature that will help migrate Azure AD from the classic virtual network to a Resource Manager virtual network. In this case, they do not need to delete the managed AD domain. The feature will be available for public preview by December 2017.
For those who are running a test instance in Azure AD domain service can simply disable the current service and create a new instance using Resource Manager virtual network as the base.
The company plans to go all in on resource manager virtual networks and migration process for the existing AD domains, in coming weeks before this feature is available for GA.