Configuring a VM for SSH access

To be accessible by SSH, a VM needs to be configured with a VLAN Network and the SSH public key data needs to be provided via cloudinit. We have documentation demonstrating this for Terraform deployments and for the Rancher GUI.

After the VM is configured, the IP address for the VM can be found in the Rancher GUI or by using kubectl with a suitable kubeconfig file and the name of the namespace where the VM is deployed:

kubectl get virtualmachineinstance.kubevirt.io --namespace my-ns

The VM's base image will typically be configured with a default username with SSH login enabled. The username varies depending on the base image of the VM.

Image OS	Default SSH username
RHEL	cloud-user
Almalinux	almalinux
Ubuntu	ubuntu
Debian	debian

VMs are not typically configured to allow SSH login to the root account.

Follow these instructions to access a VM with SSH.