Recently I came across an environment where Exchange was being migrated to Office 365. As you may know, DirSync is no longer supported for Exchange/O365 migrations and Microsoft recommends you now use Azure AD Connect.

With that said, recently in a PoC environment, using Azure AD Connect, the domain controller that was running the Azure AD Connect utility was never uninstalled, and the VM was shortly deleted. Well, as a result, the O365 admins are now getting reminded daily that their AD Sync has failed to connect.

As of today, there is no way to disable Azure AD Connect via the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) portal, but this can be done with some PowerShell. If you take a look at the ARM portal, there is no option to currently disable the directory synchronization.

First, you will need to install the Azure Active Directory Connection utility, the download for that can be found HERE. This will provide you the PowerShell cmdlet’s needed to run the code below. No, AzureADPreview V2 will not work (yet…).

Once installed, launch the PowerShell console and we will need to connect to Azure AD and trigger the Directory Sync to false. Below are the commands you will need to get this done. Note, you will need an Azure global admin account with the *@*.onmicrosoft.com domain to successfully sign into Azure AD via PowerShell.

#specify credentials for azure ad connect $Msolcred = Get-credential #connect to azure ad Connect-MsolService -Credential $MsolCred

#disable AD Connect / Dir Sync Set-MsolDirSyncEnabled –EnableDirSync $false

#confirm AD Connect / Dir Sync disabled (Get-MSOLCompanyInformation).DirectorySynchronizationEnabled

If you choose to re-enable the AD Connect, just change the flag to TRUE.

Set-MsolDirSyncEnabled –EnableDirSync $true

Once complete, we can now verify the Directory Sync has now been disabled in ARM.

For more on Azure AD PowerShell cmdlets, visit the following page, HERE.