How do I RDP into an Azure VM?

Post date: 2022-08-10 06:59:33

I have Owner access to an Azure subscription. None of the developers who were previously part of the project are there and there is no one that knows how to get into the VMs. I've been told that the VMs are domain joined (I believe RBAC is the correct term now?), but when I try to RDP with my credentials it won't take. I have full access to the Azure web portal, what's my next step to get access to these machines?

I'm being extremely careful as I also have access to the production servers and I'm treating this as it wasn't setup correctly. One of the VMs that I've identified as a dev environment has a load balancer, NSG and public IP address. It looks setup correctly and if I RDP to the public IP address and the frontend port for RDP I get a warning in my RDP client that the certificate is not trusted (that's fine), and then I get a credential prompt so I assume this means I'm actually hitting it and it is RDP enabled. Plus someone specifically setup NAT forwarding for RDP.

For my credentials I tried to use the same as I used to login to Azure: username@domain.com and my password, I also tried domain.comusername and none of them work. The "VM Agent" was apparently not installed so I can't run any powershell troubleshooting scripts in the web portal on this.

What are my next steps? The one thing I was able to check was on the VM in the portal I click Connect, then Troubleshoot Connection and I click "Test Connection" which is supposed to apparently test NAT/firewall rules and it works fine.

There's a "Reset Password" option but when I go that I see this error: The VM agent is either unavailable, or not installed, which may prevent VMAccess from running.

What are my next steps to get into this? Obviously no one left me any documentation or anything. I'm guessing whoever did this did it all by hand there's no deployment scripts I can follow to see how these VMs were setup. I think my Google is simply failing me. I guess it looks like I can take a snapshot and download the VHD (7TB?!) I'd prefer not to do that as I don't even have 7TB. Thanks!

N.B., The person who gave me Owner in the AD group on Azure is just an IT helpdesk person and this is the extent of their knowledge.

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