GenericCloud (QCOW2) Deployment

GenericCloud Deployment

RLC provides GenericCloud QCOW2 images for on-premises VM deployment. These images are provisioned using cloud-init.

Available GenericCloud Images

All images are available for x86_64 and aarch64 architectures. Download from the CIQ Portal.

Image Defaults

The rocky user has full sudo access without a password. Root SSH login is disabled by cloud-init (disable_root: true). SSH password authentication is disabled (ssh_pwauth: false) — you must provide SSH keys through cloud-init.

Deploying with libvirt

Prepare cloud-init Data

GenericCloud images require cloud-init user data to provision SSH keys for access. Create the following files:

user-data:

#cloud-config
users:
  - name: rocky
    ssh_authorized_keys:
      - ssh-ed25519 AAAA... user@example

meta-data:

instance-id: rlc-vm-01
local-hostname: rlc-vm-01

Deploy the VM

sudo virt-install \
    --name rlc-pro-vm \
    --memory 4096 \
    --vcpus 2 \
    --noreboot \
    --disk /path/to/RLC-Pro-9-GenericCloud.qcow2 \
    --cloud-init user-data="$(pwd)/user-data,meta-data=$(pwd)/meta-data" \
    --os-variant rocky9

NVIDIA Image with GPU Passthrough

For the NVIDIA (CUDA) image, attach a GPU using PCI passthrough:

sudo virt-install \
    --name rlc-pro-gpu-vm \
    --memory 16384 \
    --vcpus 8 \
    --noreboot \
    --disk /path/to/RLC-Pro-9-Cuda-GenericCloud.qcow2 \
    --cloud-init user-data="$(pwd)/user-data,meta-data=$(pwd)/meta-data" \
    --host-device <pci-address> \
    --os-variant rocky9

Use lspci | grep -i nvidia on the host to identify the GPU PCI address (e.g., pci_0000_41_00_0).

Resizing the Disk

Resize the QCOW2 image before first boot if your workload requires more space:

qemu-img resize /path/to/RLC-Pro-9-GenericCloud.qcow2 100G

The guest filesystem will be expanded automatically on first boot by cloud-init's growpart and resizefs modules.

Post-Deployment Setup

After the VM boots, SSH in as the rocky user and set up repository access:

# Log in to CIQ Depot
sudo depot login -u [USER STRING] -t [USER TOKEN]

# Enable RLC Pro (or RLC+)
sudo depot enable rlc-pro-9

# Update the system
sudo dnf update -y

Verify the Deployment

# System identity
cat /etc/os-release

# CIQ kernel
uname -r

# Active repositories
sudo dnf repolist

Expected output for RLC Pro 9.7:

PRETTY_NAME="Rocky Linux from CIQ Pro 9.7 (Blue Onyx)"

5.14.0-611.34.1+2.1.el9_7_ciq.x86_64

Support

For deployment issues, contact CIQ Support or refer to the FAQs.