How VM tags, priorities, and Group by Tag let you organize many VMs without losing your mind
Updated May 8, 2026A tag is a free-form label you attach to a VM. Once you have more than a handful of VMs, tags become the primary tool for finding, filtering, and grouping them in the dashboard.
Tags column on the VM list — when a VM has many tags, only a couple fit inline. The lowest-priority numbers (1, 2, 3, …) show first; tags without a priority show last.
Group order in Group by Tag view — described below.
A common convention: use priority 1 for the most important “what is this?” tag (e.g. prod), priority 2 for ownership (team-payments), no priority for everything else.
Toggle the View: List / Group by Tag control at the top right of the Instances list. The list reorganizes into groups, one per tag.
Ordering of groups:
By priority value — groups with priority 1 come before priority 2, etc.
By tag name alphabetically — when two groups share the same priority, the tie breaks by name.
Untagged VMs appear separately at the top, before any grouped VMs.
The number in brackets on the group header is the priority ([1] raff-app-stack); the second number is the count of VMs in the group ((5 VMs)).Sub-grouping: up to 2 levels deep. A VM that carries two tags shows up under the higher-priority group at level 1, with the second tag forming a sub-group inside it. Beyond 2 levels, additional tags appear inline on the VM row but don’t form further nesting.
When you rename a tag, the change applies to every VM that carries it — there is no other tag with the same name elsewhere; the tag is one record account-wide.This makes mass-renaming safe (one rename = consistent everywhere), but typos propagate. Pick names with care, or fix them globally as soon as you spot one.
Hostnames auto-generate as <os>-<cpu>-<ram>-NN at creation (e.g. ubuntu-1cpu-2gb-01). Edit per-VM at creation, or rename later. The OS-internal hostname (what the kernel reports) is separate — set it inside the VM with hostnamectl set-hostname (Linux) or System Properties (Windows).
20 — covers any reasonable env / team / stack / project mix. If you’re hitting it, you’re probably encoding things in tags that should be separate metadata
Tag name characters
Free-form text. Keep names short (5–20 chars) and consistent for fast filtering
Bulk tag operations
Per-VM via the Add Tag dialog and tags:set action; the dashboard’s bulk-select doesn’t yet support a multi-VM tag-edit. Use raff vm tags set on each VM in a script for fleet-wide changes
