# Roles and Identity Sources

It is very common for large Enterprises to have an existing identity source that they would like to plug in to VM Essentials for authentication. This includes services like LDAP, Active Directory, OKTA, Jump Cloud, One Login, and SAML. When using these services it becomes important to configure a role mapping between the VM Essentials role assignments to the equivalent identity source groups/roles the user belongs to. This is configurable within the identity source management UI. Sections are provided allowing things like LDAP groups to be directly mapped to specific roles within VM Essentials. If a user matches more than one LDAP/role group then both sets of roles are applied to the user automatically. Configuring Identity Sources is done in Administration > Users. Additionally, administrators may opt to lock users to their mapped role in VM Essentials or keep the roles unlocked to manually administer roles in one-off scenarios. See the docs section dedicated to identity sources for more information on configuring the specific SSO technologies VM Essentials supports.
