As a preparation for my upcoming posts about Bare Metal Deployment of physical servers and another one on Cluster Creation with VMM 2012, I will first write a couple of introductory blogs.

  • Setting Up Run As Accounts and Run As Profiles
  • Out of Band Management
  • Adding HP iLO as an OOB Management Protocol
  • Creating Server Hardware Profiles

The main reason for creating Run As Accounts and Run As Profiles is to provide a container for a set of stored credentials. It is very convenient to configure this once in a central location and then easily use it in all sorts of configuration tasks or when delegating certain tasks to delegated admins.

What different categories of Run As Accounts are available?
  • Profile Accounts – can be used for operating system profiles, application profiles, SQL Server profiles and host profiles
  • Storage Device Account – for configuring the credentials of a storage array or storage management server
  • BMC Account – for configuring a Base Management Controller such as HP iLO or Dell DRAC
  • Host Computer Account – for configuring a virtualization host (Hyper-V, XenServer, VMware)
  • Network Device Account – for configuring a network load balancer
  • External Account – for access to an external computer of some other kind


How do we configure Run As accounts and Run As profiles?

Go to the Settings wunderbar in the left bottom corner and expand the Security node. Here you will find Run As Accounts and Run As Profiles.

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Select Create Run As Account from the Ribbon
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Provide a name preferably by adhering to a naming standard, provide a description for this account, choose a category and enter the Username and Password.

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Next you can add this account to one or more Run As Profiles

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If you don’t want to add the Run As Account to a Profile this is acceptable too. In the next screen I’ve added a Run As Account of type Storage Device without adding it to a Run As Profile. The difference between the two that the first one is placed in the category Profile Account and the second one shows up in the Storage Device category.

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Creating the Run As Profile can be performed in a similar fashion:

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Having prepared both a number of Run As Accounts and one or more Run As Profiles we are ready for the next step: Out of Band Management in SCVMM 2012 which will be our next blog in the series.