Skip to content

shannonlowder.com

Menu
  • About
  • Biml Interrogator Demo
  • Latest Posts
Menu

SQL Azure and Azure Active Directory: Part Two

Posted on September 6, 2017August 29, 2017 by slowder

After getting AD Password Authentication working with my Azure SQL server, I moved on and set up a local Active Directory domain on my home network.  I don’t think this is something every data professional should try and tackle.  I count myself extremely fortunate to have made friends with IT professionals outside the data space, and they don’t seem to mind when I ask lots of questions about their specialties.  At least, not as long as I’m sharing the data space with them as well!

Planning

You’ll need to plan out your domain before you begin.  In my case, I already had my network configured to use 192.168.254.x. My Fiber router serves as my default gateway as well as my DHCP server and primary DNS server for my local network. My wireless access points, primary workstation, and printer are already set up for static IP addresses.  I have already set aside a subnet of addresses for static servers.  I also already own a domain name (toyboxcreations.net).  Having all this set up before trying to install my domain controller help by saving time.

The Install

At first, I wanted to install Windows 2016 core. My hardware was old. The best machine I had available was an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 with 6GB of ram. After getting this machine running as a domain controller on core, I found out that Active Directory Connect (the software that synchronizes your local domain with Azure) requires a GUI. Which seems silly, considering it’s a service and therefore runs in the background after installing.

So I installed Windows 2016 with full GUI.  After installing, you have to install the domain components.  Then the fun begins!  Set the IP address to a static address.  Configure the machine to act as a DNS server, name the domain, create your first user, and reboot.  Trust me, there are several steps to getting this to work, and there are many guides that will help you set this up in your own environment.  Follow those guides.  Once you can log in to the domain controller with a Domain Administrator account, you’re ready to try to add a machine (VM or physical) to the domain.

Remember, you have to have a “pro” edition of windows to connect to a domain.

Once you can bind a machine to your newly formed domain, you’re ready to set up Azure AD Connect.

I’m not an advanced user, so I went with express settings.  On the next screen, you’re prompted to log in to your Azure AD.  Fortunately, my AAD login is also the Azure account owner. So there is no issue with having enough rights to bind my local and Azure ActiveDirectory domains.  This software will be able to create and destroy objects in your AAD instance, so the account should have at least AAD Admin rights to proceed.

After entering your AAD credentials, you have to enter your local AD credentials.  This needs to be an account with “Enterprise Administrator” privileges.  Considering this process will be able to create and remove objects from your local domain, this makes sense.

After you log in to both accounts, you’re ready to go!  Click Install to install the software, save the settings to your local machine, and start the synchronization service.  Since my machine was light on resources, this took several minutes to complete.  Once it completes, the wizard gives you some extra options for syncing your Win 10 machines with Azure AD as registered devices by running Initialize-ADSyncDomainJOinedComputerSync from the ADSyncPrep module.  This step is optional.

Go ahead and verify you can log in to your windows 10 domain machine using Azure AD credentials, and try logging into your Azure portal using one of your on-prem AD credentials. Both should work perfectly now!

Using Local Domain Creds with SSMS

Remember the Azure AD group “SQL Administrators” from the previous article?  Go ahead and add your local account to the group’s members. Once you do, you can use either your AAD or your local AD credentials to log in to your Azure SQL servers.

Go ahead and verify you can log in with either account using Active Directory Password Authentication or Active Directory Universal Authentication. Just keep in mind if you use Universal Authentication, you’ll have to close and reopen SSMS in order to test the second set of credentials.

So now we can use two out of the three AD authentication options in SSMS. You can use these two on a domain bound machine, or on a workgroup machine.  Just having the two domains running with synchronization between them allow this to work.

Active Directory Integrated Authentication

So we have one last authentication scheme that doesn’t work.  To get integrated Authentication to work, we have to create a federated trust between the two domains.  You’d think that we already have that with our Sync…but you’d be wrong.  Next time, I’ll walk through that federation, and get this last option up and running.  If you have any questions in the meantime, please let me know!

 

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

  • A New File Interrogator
  • Using Generative AI in Data Engineering
  • Getting started with Microsoft Fabric
  • Docker-based Spark
  • Network Infrastructure Updates

Recent Comments

  1. slowder on Data Engineering for Databricks
  2. Alex Ott on Data Engineering for Databricks

Archives

  • July 2023
  • June 2023
  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • October 2018
  • August 2018
  • May 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • June 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • August 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006
  • March 2006
  • February 2006
  • January 2006
  • December 2005
  • November 2005
  • October 2005
  • September 2005
  • August 2005
  • July 2005
  • June 2005
  • May 2005
  • April 2005
  • March 2005
  • February 2005
  • January 2005
  • November 2004
  • September 2004
  • August 2004
  • July 2004
  • April 2004
  • March 2004
  • June 2002

Categories

  • Career Development
  • Data Engineering
  • Data Science
  • Infrastructure
  • Microsoft SQL
  • Modern Data Estate
  • Personal
  • Random Technology
  • uncategorized
© 2025 shannonlowder.com | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme