Guest environment

The Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped guest environment is a necessary component to configure SSH keys on your virtual machines (VM) to both connect and transfer files remotely. You must have the guest environment before you connect to a VM and transfer files, where you configure the SSH keys and use the secure copy (SCP) command-line tool. The guest environment is installed and enabled by default on all GDC VMs.

Request permissions and access

To perform the tasks listed in this page, you must have the Project VirtualMachine Admin role. Follow the steps to either verify your access or have your Project IAM Admin assign you the Project VirtualMachine Admin (project-vm-admin) role in the namespace of the project where the VM resides.

Disable access management

Follow these steps to disable the access management feature while keeping the guest environment enabled:

Stop your VM.
Edit the VM spec field:
```
kubectl edit virtualmachines.virtualmachine.gdc.goog VM_NAME -n VM_NAMESPACE
```
Replace VM_NAME with your VM name, and VM_NAMESPACE with your VM namespace.

Add the following fields to the spec field:

apiVersion: virtualmachine.gdc.goog/v1
kind: VirtualMachine
metadata:
  name: vm-example
  namespace: project-example
spec:
  guestEnvironment:
    accessManagement:
      enable: false

The name field contains your VM name, and the namespace field contains your VM namespace.

Restart your VM.