How to create Virtual KVM on Kimsufi / OVH / SoYouStart

Kimsufi is one of the cheapest dedicated server provider, with sometimes plain mad discount. They are sub brand of OVH. SoYouStart is also their sub brand, but not as cheap.

This post is probably a little too late, because at the time of writing, their Flash Sale just run out of stock. But I managed to buy one for this blog

Long story short, if you’ve ever setup server here at Kimsufi / SoYouStart/ OVH, you will realize that they didn’t offer IPMI / KVM. They just have “recovery mode” based on Debian. So if you misconfigured the network … well congrats.

But we have another way, we’re going to talk about that here. TL;DR, you’re going to boot your server using QEMU, using the physical disk as the disk, forwarding ports using NAT, and connecting to the display using VNC.

You need to boot to rescue mode, then install qemu-system-x86.

root@rescue:~# apt-get update && apt-get -y install qemu-system-x86

You can boot from ISO. Just put it to /tmp, and to make it easier, we’re going to save it as installer.iso.

Ubuntu Trusty Mini ISO :

root@rescue:~# wget -O /tmp/installer.iso http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/trusty-updates/main/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/mini.iso

Windows 10 x64 ISO (from here) :

root@rescue:~# wget -O /tmp/installer.iso "https://rinaldo.id/mirror/Win10_1709_English_x64_VirtIO.iso"

You can then boot using QEMU, using this command.

root@rescue:~# qemu-system-x86_64 -net nic -net user,hostfwd=tcp::80-:80,hostfwd=tcp::443-:443 -m 1024M -localtime -enable-kvm -hda /dev/sda  -vnc 0.0.0.0:0 -cdrom /tmp/installer.iso -boot d

Note :

• -cdrom /tmp/installer.iso can be removed if you don’t use CDROM, and wanting to boot from disk.
• -vnc 0.0.0.0:0 means listen on port 5900 (display :0), if you want port 5901, use :1. 0.0.0.0 means listen to every IP address.
• hostfwd=tcp::xx-:yy, useful to forward port yy on the VM to xx on the host. You can change it to 3389 for forwarding RDP. You can also forward more ports by adding more value to it.
• -hda /dev/sda for mounting the first disk. If you have more than one disk, you can add -hdb /dev/sdb and so on. I never tested it with hardware RAID, but Soft Raid (mdadm) does work. Just add all the disk
• -m 1024M means 1024M RAM for the VM.
• Your CPU must support VT-x (Intel) / SVM (AMD). Maybe Atom powered servers can’t be booted using this, but newer Atom does support it. Just give it a try.
  

A cheaper method would be getting an OVH based server by buying a DDoS Protected VPS from Evolution Host.