Azure VM User Accounts

Rotating local and remote user accounts on Azure Virtual Machines with Keeper

Overview

In this guide, you'll learn how to rotate Azure Virtual Machine local and remote user accounts within the Azure environment using KeeperPAM.

• See the Azure Overview for a high level overview and getting started with Azure

Prerequisites

• Rotation enforcements are configured for your role

• A Keeper Secrets Manager application has been created

• Your Azure environment is configured per our documentation

• A Keeper Rotation gateway is already installed

• The Gateway can communicate to the target Windows machine using WinRM or SSH

• PowerShell is available on all Windows machines and bash on all Linux targets

1. Set up PAM Machine Records

Keeper can rotate any local user account on either the Gateway machine or any other machine on the network. A PAM Machine record should be created for every machine. This PAM Machine record will be associated to a linked administrative credential that has the rights to change passwords for users on the machine.

Once a PAM Machine record is created for every machine, a PAM User record needs to be created for each user account that will be rotated.

The following table lists all the required fields that needs to be filled on the PAM Machine records.

Field	Description
Title	Name of the Record e.g. Windows Machine 1
Hostname or IP Address	Machine hostname or IP as accessed by the Gateway, e.g. 10.0.1.4
Port	Typically 5985 or 5986 for WinRM, 22 for SSH
Private PEM Key	Required for SSH if not using a password
Operating System	The VM Operating System: Windows or Linux
SSL Verification	For WinRM, if selected, will use SSL mode port 5986. Ignored for SSH. See this section for troubleshooting tips

2. Set up PAM Configuration

Note: You can skip this step if you already have a PAM Configuration set up for this environment.

Make sure the following items are completed first:

• A Keeper Secrets Manager application has been created

• A Keeper Rotation gateway is already installed, running, and is provisioned in the Keeper Secrets Manager application you created.

• PAM Machine records have been created for each target machine

If you are creating a new PAM Configuration, login to the Keeper Vault and select "Secrets Manager", then select the "PAM Configurations" tab, and click on "New Configuration". The following table lists all the required fields that needs to be filled on the PAM Configuration.

Field	Description
Title	Configuration name, example: Azure Demo
Environment	Select: Azure Network
Gateway	Select the Gateway that is configured on the Keeper Secrets Manager application and has network access to your Active Directory server from the pre-requisites
Application Folder	Select the Shared folder where the PAM Configuration will be stored. We recommend placing this in a shared folder with the admin accounts, not the machines.
Azure ID	A unique ID for this instance of Azure. This is for your reference and can be anything, but its recommended to be kept short Ex: Azure-prod
Client ID	The unique Application (client) ID assigned to your app by Azure AD when the application was registered.
Client Secret	The client credentials secret for the Azure application.
Subscription ID	The UUID that identifies your subscription (i.e. Pay-As-You-GO) to use Azure services.
Tenant ID	The UUID of the Azure Active Directory

For more details on all the configurable fields in the PAM Configuration record, visit this page.

3. Set up PAM User records

Keeper Rotation will use the credentials linked from the PAM Machine record to rotate the credentials of accounts referenced by the PAM User records.

The following table lists all the required fields that need to be filled on the PAM User record:

Field	Description
Title	Keeper record title i.e. Local User1
Login	Case sensitive username of the account being rotated. The username has to be in one of the following formats: domain\username username@domain
Password	Account password is optional, rotation will set one if blank

4. Configure Rotation on the PAM User records

Select the PAM User record(s) from Step 3, edit the record and open the "Password Rotation Settings".

• Select the desired schedule and password complexity.

• The "Rotation Settings" should use the PAM Configuration setup previously.

• The "Resource Credential" field should select the PAM Machine admin credential specific to this user's machine.

• Upon saving, the rotation button will be enabled and available to rotate on demand, or via the selected schedule.

Any user with edit rights to a PAM User record has the ability to setup rotation for that record.

Helpful Resources

• Setting up WinRM on your Azure VM

Service Management

Keeper can automatically update the Windows service account "log on as" credentials for any Windows services running as the PAM User, and restart the service. Keeper will also update the credential of any scheduled task running as that user on the target machine.

To learn more and set up this capability, see the Service Management page.