Stories like this is what makes me believe immutable infrastructure is the future.
Basically, you destroy a VM and spin up a new one with one of your images, it will then use chef or salt to pull in its config.
SSH isn't needed then.
There are plenty of tutorials, but it is boring to follow them manually, especially if you need to make a couple of tweaks to ISO or update it.
So I put together a couple of scripts to automate the process: