Installing virtual machine service

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The virtual machine service provides the capability to provision and manage virtual machines on the IBM® Sovereign Core platform.

Before you begin

Note: The virtual machine service in IBM Sovereign Core is in technical preview and should not be used in the production environment.
  1. You must have the System editor role in the system account to install the virtual machine service.
  2. One-time setup Provision a Red Hat® OpenShift® cluster with sufficient compute resources for your virtual machine workloads.
    1. From Platform capabilities in the navigation menu, click Create cluster for the Virtual machine service: Technical preview capability.
    2. The cluster must be labeled with the vm.sovereign.cloud.ibm.com/virtualization-enabled=true identifier to be used for the virtual machine service.
    3. Set the Enable observability toggle to provision the cluster with logging and metric collection.
    4. From the IBM Sovereign Core system home page, set the default storage class for the cluster. The configured storage class applies to the Fedora sample container disk image and all virtual machines that you create.

Procedure

  1. Log in to the landing zone server that you used to install the platform. Download the latest Fedora image to your IBM Sovereign Core environment.
    Note: The Fedora containerdisk image version 44-1.7 does not include the fix for CVE-2026-31431. Monitor the Fedora KubeVirt curated containerdisk repository for an updated version that contains the fix. Mirror the updated image when it becomes available.
    Mirror the example Fedora image from quay.io/containerdisks/fedora:latest to the control plane's registry at ${QUAY_URL}/sovcloud/cp/sovereign-cloud-platform/automation-saas-platform-dev/containerdisks/fedora:latest.
  2. From the Platform capabilities in the system account navigation menu, click Configure service for the Virtual machine service: Technical preview capability.
  3. Set the Show service globally toggle to make the service available in all tenant accounts.
  4. If the virtual machine service is connected to any tenant, run the script on the landing zone to pull the Red Hat® OpenShift® image registry resources to ensure access. The script mirrors existing resources for the virtual machine service for tenants, so that required configuration is available for openshift-config namespace. For more information about the script and steps, see the IBM Sovereign Core GitHub repository.

What to do next

The virtual machine service is set up and ready to use. For details about additional configuration such as setting quotas, adding guest operating systems, and more, see the runbooks in the IBM Sovereign Core GitHub repository.

Tenant users can now create and manage virtual machines in their accounts. For details, see Managing virtual machines.