Install qemu-guest-agent

The guest agent is a small service that runs inside your server and answers questions from the platform: what IP addresses do you have, how full are your disks, what’s your hostname. Without it those questions have no answer, so the panel shows blanks.

It is the single highest-value thing to install on a fresh server, and it takes one command.

What you get back by installing it

Panel feature	Without the agent	With the agent
IP addresses on the Network tab	blank	reported by the guest
Hostname	blank	reported by the guest
Disk usage	shown as —	real used/total, per filesystem
Reset root password	fails	works
Snapshots of a running server	crash-consistent only	filesystem quiesced first
Memory figure	reflects allocation, reads high	reflects real guest usage

Three of those deserve expanding.

Resetting the password is not merely degraded — it doesn’t work at all. The platform changes a guest password by asking the agent to do it. No agent, no channel, and the action returns an error. Your alternative is the console and your OS’s own recovery process.

Disk usage can only be measured from inside. The platform knows how big your virtual disk is, but not how much of it your filesystem has actually consumed — only the guest knows that. With the agent installed, the server’s Disk figure shows real usage, and every mounted filesystem is listed separately, so / filling up while /boot sits idle is visible at a glance.

Snapshots become safer. The agent can freeze the filesystem for the instant the snapshot is taken, so the image is internally consistent. Without it you get the equivalent of pulling the power cable at that moment — usually fine, occasionally a database that needs repair on restore. See Snapshots.

Note

If you installed your own operating system from an ISO, you almost certainly do not have the agent — the install replaced the disk it came on. This is expected; just install it again below.

Install it

Run these as root, or with sudo.

Debian and Ubuntu

apt update
apt install -y qemu-guest-agent
systemctl enable --now qemu-guest-agent

RHEL, Rocky, AlmaLinux and Oracle Linux

dnf install -y qemu-guest-agent
systemctl enable --now qemu-guest-agent

Alpine

apk add qemu-guest-agent
rc-update add qemu-guest-agent default
rc-service qemu-guest-agent start

Windows

The agent ships as part of the VirtIO guest tools.

1. In the panel, open your server and mount the virtio-win ISO — see Install your own OS from an ISO for how to mount one.
2. In Windows, open the mounted drive and run virtio-win-guest-tools.exe.
3. Accept the defaults. This installs the guest agent along with the VirtIO drivers.
4. Confirm the QEMU Guest Agent service is running in services.msc, then eject the ISO.

Check it worked

systemctl status qemu-guest-agent

You want active (running). Then go back to the panel, open the server, and look at the Network tab — the IP addresses should now be listed. If the panel still shows blanks after a minute, reload the page; the panel reads this live rather than caching it.

Troubleshooting

The service starts, but the panel still shows nothing. The agent talks over a virtual serial channel that has to be enabled on the server itself. On servers we provisioned this is already on. If yours was created before that became the default, open a ticket from Support and we’ll enable it — it takes effect on the next boot and doesn’t change anything else.

Unit qemu-guest-agent.service not found after installing. On some minimal images the package is named qemu-ga. Try systemctl enable --now qemu-ga.

It stops after a reboot. You installed it but didn’t enable it. Re-run the systemctl enable --now line above — enable is what survives a restart.