Federated Identities to Windows Azure Pack through AD FS – Part 1 of 3

In few of the previous posts, Anders Ravnholt discussed Installation & Configuration of WAP and Reconfiguration with FQDNs, ports and Trusted Certificates in detail. In this series, I will discuss how to configure AD FS and enable it to provide Identities to your WAP installation.

Scenario

Contoso Inc. is a Service Provider that hosts a private cloud stack and offers Compute resources to their customers. Contoso wants to install a Windows Azure Pack stack and

  1. Provide administrative access to users from its own Active Directory
  2. Provide self-service access to the Tenant Portal to users from Fabrikam Corp, one of its customers.

We will run through this scenario in 3 parts:

In this first part of the blog series, we will discuss how Contoso can set up an AD FS instance in their Corp domain.

In the second part, we will discuss how Contoso can set up trust between the AD FS instance and the WAP Admin Portal and provides its users, access to the Management Portal.

In the third part, we will discuss how Contoso can enable Fabrikam's users to access the Tenant portal by establishing trust between Fabrikam's AD FS and Contoso's AD FS.

 Drawing1_thumb1Personas

Rob is a Fabric Administrator who is responsible for maintaining the infrastructure. Rob was tasked with installing the Windows Azure Pack Stack for Contoso Inc.

Mary is the Domain administrator for pcloud.contoso.corp domain in Contoso's Active Directory. Mary has necessary permissions to configure the AD FS linked to the domain.

Alan is a Tenant Administrator who is responsible for Creating and Managing Plans and Subscriptions in Windows Azure Pack.

Assumptions and Scope

  • In this scenario, we assume the following about the environment:
  • Windows Azure Pack is already set up in the pcloud.contoso.corp domain
  • All the components in the environment have been configured with certificates from a Trusted CA      
     
  • We also assume the following about you, the reader:

Enabling the AD FS Role

Mary is the Domain Administrator for the domain ‘pcloud’ which is a domain in the ‘Contoso.corp’   forest. She has the necessary permissions to add an AD FS instance to the pcloud domain.

  1. Mary logs into a machine that is joined to the pcloud domain and which will host the AD FS service. She enables the AD FS role from the Server Manager by clicking on ‘Manage’ and selecting ‘Add Roles and Features’image
  2. After selecting the local server, she selects ‘Active Directory Federation Services’ from the Server Roles tab and clicks ‘Next’. The rest of the steps are standard and nothing needs to be changed, so she clicks through the wizard and Clicks ‘Finish’. This will install the AD FS instance on the server
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Configuring the AD FS server

  1. Once Installation completes, Server Manager will show an Exclamation mark in the Notifications to indicate that the role has not been configured yet. Mary clicks on the notification to open the AD FS Configuration Wizard. This is the first server in  the AD FS farm, so she selects ‘Create the first federation server in a federation server farm’ and moves on to the next step
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  2. She Selects the current user (herself) as the one configuring the farm
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  3. The next step is to configure the Federation Service Name. Note that this can be different from the actual AD FS Machine name. This is the name that will be used by other services to reach AD FS.
    In this step, Mary also has to provide a certificate for SSL/TLS based access. This certificate needs to be issued by a trusted Public CA as this is presented to the users when they attempt to login. She already has a wild card cert for *.pcloud.contoso.com that she can use to configure the AD FS server.

    Note: In case a wild card certificate is not available, the certificate subject name should match with the AD FS Federation Service name
        
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  4. In the Specify Database Step, Mary decides which database to use to store AD FS install. She can either use a Windows Internal Database or a SQL Server.
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  5. Once all the options are reviewed, she clicks on ‘Configure’ to configure AD FS
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  6. That’s it! Smile the pcloud domain now has an AD FS instance that is associated with it and can be used to provide administrative users to the WAP installation
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You can find more information about AD FS at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831502.aspx

Visit Part 2 of this blog series for a walkthrough on how Contoso uses this AD FS instance to provide Admin identities to WAP.

Visit Part 3 of this blog series for a walk through on how Contoso uses this AD FS instance to federate with Fabrikam’s AD through a Fabrikam AD FS to provide tenant Identities to WAP.