Sharepoint 2013 : New Installation and Configuration - Managed Accounts

As with its predecessor, SharePoint 2013 uses managed accounts. Managed accounts allow administrators to maintain Windows system accounts, in use by SharePoint, in a central location. Thus, if you need to change SharePoint to use a different service account, you have to change it in only one place in Central Administration, and not across various services and applications (except for a few rare circumstances). Managed accounts also allow SharePoint to manage password change, enforced by Domain Group Policy.

I will discuss managed accounts further, or now I am focusing on the various accounts required in the domain and their purposes as managed accounts. Table 1 lists the accounts that Microsoft recommends for a maintainable and secure SharePoint farm (you can choose the account names, as long as you can assign the permissions as listed).

You need only the first three accounts in Table 1 to install SharePoint 2013, and in many test and development environments, you can live with just the first five accounts for all aspects of the farm configuration. However, in the spirit of good practice and in preparation for the day when you have to stand up a production SharePoint 2013 farm, I recommend getting in the habit of creating all of these accounts for configuration.