On a cleanish windows 2012 R1 box, not domain connected (or hosting) we managed to install all the components and statrup the configuration process
Though we failed to connect to our IDP using the certified domain, we could use the onmicrosoft IDP:
We had to go activate our tenants and domains for sync (since we have never bothererd, till now)
Now, despite that we really don’t want to sync AD to AAD (but a SQL db to AAD), we have to go install an AD – so there is a forest:
so we installed AD
Once we got an AD (and AAD to which one can sync up) we could logon locally to the AD
and start up to configure the sync option set:
Peter's ruminations 