I think we need to take a step back a bit. These are my assumption so please correct me if I am wrong
Can you ssh as a normal user (not root) from deploy machine 1 to target machine 2?
No, I was under the assumption that this installation was all done on 1 machine with a url to login to?
I have a private cloud setup running on vmware - I deployed an ubuntu server instance and started the v2-deploy guide? - I assumed this was what is needed?
Here is the guide for self hosting
You need to have a fully qualified domain name to use since the security cert needs to bind to it. Primero will not install at all on an unsecured connection. This is by design due to the nature of the information we are working with
If you would like to test and install locally its better to set up a development instance
Yeah this is the guide I followed (Self Hosting Primero v2 - Installation) as this is a private cloud with private ips - I setup the FQDN on the domain controller pointing it to the ip of the vm? I havent even gotten past the stage where I get to install primero as it just fails trying to ssh for some reason.
I will setup a different vm and test this setup (Installing Primero v2 for development on Ubuntu 18.04)
So you cannot use private ips. It needs a public world reachable ip
Alright, so setup vm with public ip, setup ssh key access and follow which guide to get this working? Also does it matter if its ubuntu 22.04? or must it be 20.04?
It depends on what you are trying to do. If you want to practice setting up for self hosting do the first and if you want to change something for your use case do the second.
It works on 20.04 but if you want to try to do it on 22.04 please post any findings so that the wider community can benefit 
what I am trying to do is set it up, as we have a use case that needs it.
Following the first guide is what I did, but as explained, it gets stuck after trying to do the ansible-playbook part. so unless there is something I did wrong in setting up the vm… the guide does not work.