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Azure AD test tenant
Hello Community, I'm stating this discussion because I likely wanted your input regarding the best way to build a test tenant in Azure. We have a Prod tenant and for some feature testing or some wi...
- What I did is set up a parallel AD domain using our as-built documentation and then registered a new domain name used exclusively for this project. Then I created an Azure tenant with a pay-as-you-go subscription linked to a credit card. Then I used Azure AD Connect to connect the test domain with the test tenant. The AD DS domain is on a completely separate VLAN and the test tenant is completely separate from our production tenant.
What this does is keep the production environment completely separate from the test environment. I can try new things on the test domain and have a pretty good idea about how it's going to affect the production environment. The best part about this is that I can experiment with new services to deeply understand them before presenting them as potential projects. The idea is to be very thorough and build a deep understanding of a service before anyone else in the company (or our team) puts time into it.
Another option, especially if it features testing you need to test is the M365 Developer program: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/dev-program, you get a fully-fledged and licensed M365 environment with pre-staged users, for about 90 days but can be extended if you are continuously using it.
- Hey Luke, if you work for a Microsoft partner, you can go to https://cdx.transform.microsoft.com/ and setup an annual tenant for testing with those same accounts. Clients can setup the same thing by registering at Fasttrack.microsoft.com and under getting started you'll see Sandbox tenant. That's the same as the dev & demo tenant with the same user personas you mentioned.
- Good to know. Thanks!
In my case I wanted to have a test environment that correspond to my productive tenant. So this is more than I need. But for sure this is a good point in case of need to test new stuffs 🙂 !
