Topics: Red Hat / Linux, Security, System Admin

Resetting the root password for a KVM guest image

Red Hat provides you the opportunity to download a KVM guest image, that you can use within virt-manager to start immediately. This saves you the trouble and time of having to install the operating system.

However, the root password is not known, and so, it may be difficult to log in as root when using the KVM guest image provided by Red Hat.

Luckily, there is an easy solution to changing the root password on a KVM guest image.

Start by installing guestfish: 

# yum -y install guestfish
Guestfish is a tool that can be used from the command line to access guest virtual machine file systems.

Next, update the image file as follows, assuming the image file is located in /var/lib/libvirt/images, and the image file is called "rhel7.5.beta1.qcow2", and you want to set the password to "PASSWORD": 
# cd /var/lib/libvirt/images
# virt-customize -a rhel7.5.beta1.qcow2 --root-password password:PASSWORD




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