# Virtual Images / Blueprints

VM Essentials will automatically take an inventory of all blueprints configured in vCenter and present them as options during provisioning. However, in order for VM Essentials to properly provision these virtual machines and provide accurate stats and health of these virtual machines, an agent must be installed during virtual machine startup. This means remote access needs to be granted at the guest operating system level to VM Essentials . To properly configure these virtual images, find the relevant images in Library > Virtual Images and edit the entry. On this form, a few options are presented. The first is a check box asking whether or not cloud-init is enabled. If cloud-init is enabled, simply provide the default OS username configured (for Ubuntu the username is ubuntu and for CentOS the username is centos). For those looking to add cloud-init to existing blueprints VM Essentials requires no special configuration and can use the default cloud.cfg settings.

A global cloud-init username/password can also be configured per account as well as a keypair via the `Admin->Provisioning` settings section. The great benefit of utilizing cloud-init is default blueprints do not need common credential sets thereby increasing provisioning security.

Windows systems do not typically support cloud-init. So simply turn this checkbox off and provide the Administrator credentials. It should be noted that these credentials are encrypted in the database. If using WinRM for the RPC Mode instead of VMware tools, a Local or Domain Administrator account credential set can be provided instead.
