Enable Azure ARM for Dyn365FO using new azure portal

Target Audience:

System administrators; Please don’t waste your time if you are a functional consultant or a coder and system administration is not one of your interest.

Let’s go for it.

With arrival of August 2016 Update (AX7 7.0.4230.16130); it was required to configure Azure Resource Manager (ARM) topology, before you could deploy a cloud box of Dyn365FO.

That was the time, when Azure classical portal was available. With retirement of Azure classical portal, on January 8, 2018, it changed the way things were being managed. One of the things, that was important to us, the D365 stockholders, was to add a custom (secondary/existing) domain. This was needed in situations when Azure portal was being managed with ONE Tenant, whereas your subscriptions such as Visual Studio subscription was being managed by OTHER Tenant. 

People were able to perform this procedure using methodology available on old classical portal as demonstrated in one of the blogposts. 

I went into such situation, recently where it was required to merge my Visual Studio subscription with my Azure Subscription. Without this it wasn’t possible for me to configure Azure ARM, because I don’t want to forget past.

This time, as I tried to perform the procedure to merge my VS subscription with Azure subscription, it went in vain, as I found that, with retirement of classical portal there is no more an option to add an existing directory.

.

Thank you to support engineer, who was located in UTC-06:00 and was still up to give me a wee phone call when it was time to have dinner in my hometown. Thank you Diego Gamboa, I must mention your name for great work done and showing me where I am heading wrong, with use of new azure portal.

Having said that, I would like to describe step by step procedure, in case if anyone else gets into this glitch.

Assumptions:

1)     Your Azure subscription is enabled with Tenant ABC@Domain1.com

2)    Your VS subscription is enabled on another azure portal with Tenant named XYZ@Domain2.com

Goal:

Merge two Tenants in AAD so that you can configure Azure ARM and can procced with deployment of cloud AX instances.

Here is what to do with new Azure portal (As of 21^st April 2018)

1)     Go to azure portal and login with XYZ@Domain2.com

2)    Add ABC@Domain1.com (user from other azure portal) to the portal that you opened at step#1. Please add it as Guest user and not as normal user.

3)    No need to assign any specific Roles to user ABC@Domain1.com in azure portal where you added it as guest user; but as a safety point you may assign any roles to this user, I added role of Global administrator because both accounts belong to me personally and I feel no menace of any intruders getting into my subscriptions (be it my organizational users or anyone else.)

4)    Time to check email using ABC@Domain1.com. F5 your inbox and accept invitation that came as you have been added as guest user.

[NotMustStart] Here is an interesting commotion that you can go with, if you don’t want to see you email, stay on azure portal as you logged in initially on stp#1; and go to the details of guest user (ABC@Domain1.com) click Resend invitation, it will do two things (a) it will resend email to guest user, (b) it will generate a URL for you. Copy the generated URL and paste it in the browser. Hit enter. Make sure you are hitting enter as you are logged on azure with ABC@Domain1.com [NotMustEnd]

5)    Go back to azure portal and login this time with ABC@Domain1.com.

6)    Search for subscription and click on Visual studio subscription.

7)    Click ‘Change Directory’. Select directory that belongs to  XYZ@Domain2.com and click Change Button.

Finally add the ‘Dynamics Deployment services’ with Contributor role, on your VS subscription.

You are ready to configure AZURE ARM in LCS and this can allow you to deploy new Cloud box of D365.

Thank You!