Yesterday Microsoft announced the General Availability of Azure Active Directory Connect. Azure AD Connect is the single tool and experience for connecting your on-premises directories to Azure AD, whether you are evaluating, piloting, or in production. If you are an existing DirSync or Azure AD Sync user, it is recommended you upgrade to this singular tool. I’ve documented the process of upgrading a single Azure AD Sync server in-place below

NOTE: This upgrade also works from the older dirsync

 

First, grab the latest Azure AD Connect download from:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=615771

 

Once downloaded, run the installer

 

 

 

Agree to the licensing terms

 

Note that during the upgrade, any existing synchronizations will not run

 

 

 

Enter the credentials in for you Azure AD account. If you aren’t already using a non-expiring Azure AD (cloud-only) account, set one up!

 

Confirm the upgrade and choose to start the synchronization immediately after the upgrade

 

 

 

 

 

 

That was easy! The upgrade is now complete.

I haven’t had a chance to track down or play with the Windows 10 domain joined PowerShell command noted below, stay tuned for more details and testing.

 

Let’s take a look at the differences in the Azure AD Connect installer. Let’s start by first launching the new Azure AD Connect icon. Note that it removed all other icons for Azure AD Sync in the process.

 

Whoops! Note that you still have to manually stop the scheduled task for the sync process.

 

Navigate to scheduled tasks and let’s disable that

 

Now, let’s run it again.

Much better!

 

Let’s first take a look at our current config

 

You can see in our lab environment we already had password sync and password write-back configured

 

 

Now, let’s see what options we have to customize the synchronization options.

 

Enter your Azure AD credentials

 

Hit Next unless you’re making any directory changes

 

Look at all those options!

For our lab I’ve chosen to not live on the edge and only chose currently available features (for now!)

 

Note that as of today, all of the Preview functions may not have relevant functions within Azure AD published yet to support them, but they are probably coming soon! 🙂

 

When complete, choose exit.

 

You’ve now successfully upgraded your Azure AD sync to Azure AD Connect!