How to deploy a Domain Controller on Microsoft Azure

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In this pos I will show you how you can create a hybrid Acrive Directory Domain with on-premiss and Azure DCs.

Requirements

  • An Azure AD tenant with an active subscription.
  • A Virtual Network in Azure that doesn’t overlap with your on-premises network.
  • A continuous line of sight between your on-premises domain controller and Microsoft Azure (Azure VPN Gateway, ExpressRoute or an NVA).

Deploy A Virtual Machine

  • Go to the azure portal (https://portal.azure.com) and login
  • Create a new Windows Server resource. I Recommened using Windows Server 2019.

Bacic info

For safety reasons, you should set allow selected ports to none.

disallow selected ports

  • Click Next to configure vm disks.

A Single VM without premium SSD’s has an SLA of 99.95%. A Single VM with premium SSD’s (all disks) has an SLA of 99.99%. I Recommend using premium disks for your domain controller.

  • Add a second (premium ssd) disk with host caching set to none. This disk will contain the database, logs and sysvol folders.

add premium ssd

  • Click Next to configure networking. Attach the VM to your existing vNet that’s connected with your on-premises domain. Don’t assign a public IP address to your virtual machine as recommended by Microsoft – use a VPN or Azure Bastion to connect to the machine.

configure network

  • Finish all steps to create the virtual machine. Don’t enable Login with AAD credentials or Auto-shutdown.

Configure static IP

The virtual machine must have a static IP address.

  • Select network interface of your new virtual machine

static ip

static ip

  • Select Static and configure the IP address. Don’t forget to click save – a reboot may be required. You should never configure the static IP address on the VM itself as you do on-premises.

static ip

Domain join

  • Test if you can ping the VM from your on-premises domain controller and the other way around.
  • Open Active Directory Sites & Services on your on-premises domain controller.
  • Create a new site

new site

new site

  • Right click Subnets and select New Subnet.

new subnet

new subnet

  • Start Add Roles and Features on the Azure VM.
  • Add the Active Directory Domain Services role and all necessary features.
  • Promote this server to a domain controller.
  • Select Add a domain controller to an existing domain.

join domain

join domain

join domain

  • Reboot the virtual machine.

Validate DC DNS Settings on Azure

When the virtual machine is back online, it probably has static DNS servers configured – this happened because of the AD DC roles. Change this back to Obtain DNS server address automatically.

configure dns server

configure dns server