azureautomationwindows-10virtual-machineuser-accounts

How do you automatically launch an Azure VM Windows 10 AND automatically login to your user account?

I have an Azure VM Windows 10 that is set to automatically launch and automatically shutdown on a specific schedule. This works fine, but as an aside was painfully hard to set up.

The VM is set to run tasks on a schedule through Windows Task Scheduler, however it appears that the user actually needs to be logged in for some of these tasks to run. Other solutions attempted to run the tasks whether the user is logged in or not do not work (for various reasons).

So, I would like to automatically login to the VM with my account each time the VM loads up. Is this possible and if so, how do you set this up?

Thanks!

Solution

  • This is a downloadable solution called Autologon provided by Microsoft that I found and implemented. It works just fine.

    The details and download are available via this link:

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/autologon

    Autologon enables you to easily configure Windows’ built-in autologon mechanism. Instead of waiting for a user to enter their name and password, Windows uses the credentials you enter with Autologon, which are encrypted in the Registry, to log on the specified user automatically.

    [!WARNING] Although the password is encrypted in the registry as an LSA secret, a user with administrative rights can easily retrieve and decrypt it. (For more information see Protecting the Automatic Logon Password )

    Autologon is easy enough to use. Just run autologon.exe, fill in the dialog, and hit Enable. The next time the system starts, Windows will try to use the entered credentials to log on the user at the console. Note that Autologon does not verify the submitted credentials, nor does it verify that the specified user account is allowed to log on to the computer.

    To turn off auto-logon, hit Disable. Also, if the shift key is held down before the system performs an autologon, the autologon will be disabled for that logon. You can also pass the username, domain and password as command-line arguments:

    autologon user domain password

    Note: When Exchange Activesync password restrictions are in place, Windows will not process the autologon configuration.