Proxmox Mail Gateway in container

The Proxmox Mail Gateway 2.2 template is an OpenVZ OS template that allows you to run the Antispam & Antivirus Mail Gateway. Proxmox runs in different virtualization environments but in OpenVZ it is almost twice as fast as with full virtualization - due to the minimal overhead. Proxmox offers free and commercial licenses.

Prerequisites

I assume you have already a running OpenVZ server. This howto is based on an fresh CentOS 4.4 installation with OpenVZ kernel 2.6.9 but should also work with all other combinations. I used a Dual Xeon with 2 GB RAM.

Installation

Download the Proxmox OpenVZ template:

wget ftp://download.proxmox.com/appliances/mail/debian-4.0-proxmox-mailgateway_2.5-1_i386.tar.gz

Copy the template into the template cache, usually to /vz/templates/cache/

Create a default config

Create a reasonable default config if you don’t have one. The following command creates the file /etc/vz/conf/ve-default.conf-sample which contains reasonable defaults if you plan to run 5 containers:

vzsplit -n 5 -f default

Create a container

Choose a free CT ID, we use 777 for this guide.

vzctl create 777 --ostemplate debian-4.0-proxmox-mailgateway-2.5 --config default

Configure the container

Set IP address and DNS nameservers, start servers automatically at boot time: please adapt these settings to your environment.

vzctl set 777 --onboot yes --ipadd 192.168.2.110 \
  --nameserver 192.168.2.100 --nameserver 192.168.2.101 \
  --hostname proxmox --searchdomain yourdomain.tld --save

Set guaranteed memory to 512MB, maximum disk space to 4GB.

vzctl set 777 --vmguarpages 512M:unlimited --privvmpages 1G:1100M --diskspace 4000M:4400M --save

Start the container

vzctl start 777

And finally set the root password:

vzctl set 777 --userpasswd root:YOURPASSWORD

Now you have a running Proxmox! By typing vzlist you should have something like this.

[root@vz1 ~]# vzlist
      CTID      NPROC STATUS  IP_ADDR         HOSTNAME
       777         56 running 192.168.2.110   proxmox
[root@vz1 ~]#

Backup considerations, live migration, and HA Cluster

The Proxmox HA Cluster consists of a master and several nodes (minimum one node) — all can be run on different OpenVZ servers within the same subnet. Configuration is done on the master, all configuration and data is synchronized to all cluster nodes over a VPN tunnel.

For online backups, see backup of a running container with vzdump.

For live migration, see checkpointing and live migration.

For HA Cluster, see HA cluster with DRBD and Heartbeat and proxmox.com.

Proxmox configuration

For the Proxmox configuration point your web browser to the given IP address.

More information on http://www.proxmox.com/