Translations:Creating a Windows VM/3/en

Key pairs

When creating a Windows VM, as when creating a Linux VM, a key-pair is required. However, this key pair is used to encrypt and decrypt a password used to access the Windows VM rather than directly as a method of authentication. There are a couple different formats for key files and you can also choose to protect your private keys with passphrases or not. In order to be able to decrypt the Windows VM password your private key must be in OpenSSH format and not have a passphrase. If you created your key-pair with OpenStack and downloaded the .pem key file it will already be in the correct format. If you used the ssh-keygen command to create your key-pair and didn't specify a passphrase it will also likely be in the correct format. For more general information about key-pairs see the SSH Keys page.

Acceptable private key

OpenSSH format without a passphrase: