How to Deploy an Ubuntu Server or AlmaLinux instance with the vss-cli

Owned by JM Lopez, created
Last updated: Jun 14, 2023
6 min read

The ITS Private Cloud is now offering in experimental stage Ubuntu Server and AlmaLinux Cloud image deployment that allows users having a virtual instance up and running in minutes. Ubuntu images are directly imported to our content library from the official repository, however, AlmaLinux images are hand-crafted into OVA by our amazing team using the official generic cloud sources.

Create SSH Keys (optional)

Although the ITS Private Cloud provides temporary credentials to access your Ubuntu/AlmaLinux virtual machine (vss-user ), it is highly recommended to use SSH Key exchange to access. In this section, we will be using ssh-keygen to generate a keypair.

To create a SSH Key, open a terminal on your workstation and run the OpenSSH tool ssh-keygen command as follows:

ssh-keygen -b 2048 -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/vss_id_rsa

Note that vss_id_rsa could be any file name you want.

Once you complete the prompts, you would get one private key and a public key: vss_id_rsa and vss_id_rsa.pub.

The following is the output of a successful execution:

ssh-keygen -b 2048 -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/vss_id_rsa Generating public/private rsa key pair. Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): Enter same passphrase again: Your identification has been saved in /Users/user/.ssh/vss_id_rsa Your public key has been saved in /Users/user/.ssh/vss_id_rsa.pub The key fingerprint is: SHA256:dBFIH0n4X020qRMA+XBxwabE9PkFKlwcsPJxBTCPBYg user@hostname The key's randomart image is: +---[RSA 2048]----+ | o.*#@B=+..| | E +=.&==..+| | o.& *+ =.| | . +.* = o| | S .. + . | | . . | | | | | | | +----[SHA256]-----+

Upload SSH Public Keys (optional)

To upload the public key to your ITS Private Cloud account, run the vss-cli key import command with the location of the vss_id_rsa.pub or the public key equivalent file:

vss-cli key mk .ssh/vss_id_rsa.pub

A similar output is expected:

To verify a successful import, run vss-cli key ls or vss-cli key get <id> as follows:

The key is now ready to be used by our post-deployment customization tools to allow ssh access to the virtual instance.

We are working on providing a SSH Key Management interface in the ITS Private Cloud Portal, but for now the vss-cli and the API are the only interfaces available to manage Keys.

Deploy Instance

This experimental feature allows picking from either of the following AlmaLinux and Ubuntu Server versions:

The simplest approach to deploy AlmaLinux or Ubuntu-22.04 is shown below:

A confirmation email is sent while the virtual machine is deployed with three important pieces of information: ssh port, admin username and temporary password, and VM console password.

Once the deployment is complete, cloud-init kicks in and starts customizing the operating system.

Verify Instance

cloud-init will run OS updates and customize the operating system, which takes some time depending on the number of packages to be updated. If the OS requires to reboot, it will take a bit longer.

After the OS reboot, try logging into the VM with the details provided in the email as follows:

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