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Virtual Machine

A Virtual Machine (VM) in vHaaS is the Execution Environment (EE) for an Assembly — the compute unit you connect to in order to access the Assembly's hardware. VMs are registered under a Cluster and assigned to Assemblies by administrators. When you book an Assembly and connect to it, you connect to its assigned VM.

  • An Assembly and its VM always belong to the same Cluster.
  • If no VM is assigned, the Assembly has no hardware access path and cannot be used for active sessions.

Connection methods

vHaaS provides two ways to connect to a VM during an active session:

  • Browser-based (recommended) — You can connect to your VM and work on a remote desktop.
  • Console tab — the Assembly page has a Console tab that gives direct terminal access to the VM without going through the Connect dialog.

See Work on Virtual Machine for step-by-step connection instructions.

Credentials

VM credentials are stored with our secret management solution and provisioned automatically when a session starts. Users do not manage credentials directly.

Labels and properties

VMs can be tagged with labels (e.g. windows, test-vm) and key-value properties (e.g. project:dummy) to support grouping, targeted software rollout, and filtering across a Cluster's VM inventory. They are set when the VM is registered and can be changed afterwards.

Software environment

vHaaS VMs come with a set of pre-installed software maintained by the vHaaS team — from basic tools present on every host to productive and test-system configurations. Software is installed and updated exclusively via Chocolatey. Users and teams can request custom software configurations for their specific needs.

See Software Installation for details on how software is installed, licensed, and customized on vHaaS VMs.

Creating and managing VMs

VMs are registered, configured, and assigned to Assemblies by Organization Admins. A VM can either run in a Cluster operated by Vector or be a self-managed machine in your own lab that connects to vHaaS through the vHaaS Agent.

See Set Up a Virtual Machine for the end-to-end workflow, the available configuration options, and troubleshooting.